Idiosyncratic Idiocies

--- by JLS
------ for the GC

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NOW WE ARE GOING SOMEWHERE!

For Jones says or comments in "Stay Tuned", THIS BLOG:

"it is still possible for someone in his own idiolect to make a mistake and say something which he immediately (or later) recognises as not what he intended to say."

I LOVE idiots, idiolects, idiosyncrasies. We were discussing this in CLASSICS-L, and an expert on New Testament Greek (and nothing else, obviously) spelt 'idiolect' 'idEolect', which gave me an attack almost.

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Grice speaks of 'idiosynratic'.

For we do not want the '-lect' in 'idiolect'. It sounds too much like a boring 'lecture'.

In Oxford there are 'lecturers' and their 'readers', and then you 'read'. Grice read philosophy. This is an idiolectal feature of Oxford English. It doesn't mean, 'read' as in 'read a book'. For surely they didn't have books in the days of 'philosophy' as when we say, "I read philosophy at Oxford". It has to do with the major and the minor.

The idea of a major and a minor is now passee in American universities. It's all 'major' for them. They, who instituted, the phrase, "Wow!", "That's GREAT!", "I LOVE it!". They tend to 'go' on the hyperbolic side of things.

Aristotle had problems with idio-, though. Cicero, poor soul, translated it as 'proprium'. The proprium of man is his bipedness. It's not the essence; it's the idion. Then we need to distinguish between proper and improper essence (I owe M. Chase for confusing me about this -- in CLASSICS-L).

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Grice writes: WoW:124:

"It [is] convenient first to
consider the idea of ... meaning
FOR AN INDIVIDUAL [utterer]."

Within a 'signalling idiolect, so to speak'.

He knows that '-lect' is boringly associated with lecture (strictly, with 'lexis' and thus linguistic) and he wants to just stick with gestures ('signalling' is a malaprop).

"and only afterwards"

should the need arise,

"to consider the EXTENSION
of this [SAME] idea
to groups of individuals"

as opposed, to echo Thatcher, groups of families, or societies.

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Grice goes on that it is SILLY at this point to talk 'convention', and he prefers, 'establishment'.

We speak of an individual utterer (himself laying in the tub rewriting the Highway Code, p. 126, in Deutero-Esperanto, WoW:Meaning Revisited).

And we speak of him as having "ESTABLISHED" a procedure. Hardly conventional.

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And so he goes on to expand on

"the middle finger"

as used by "a particular individual" (WoW:125)

to mean 'this or that'.

---- When Grice reminisced on his joint work with the Dutch orientalist, Jan Frits Staal, he would say, "We would speak of this or that". In published work he went, "We were engaged with Staal on some serious logico-linguistic issues" ('this or that').

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