On the Prigging Lay

Courtesy of JASON KENNEDY.
------ commented by JLS, for the GC.

---Ten (or a dozen) cocks of the game
2 On the prigging lay to the flashhouse came.
---Lushing blue ruin and heavy wet
4 Till the darkey when the downy set.
---All toddled and begun the hunt
6 For readers, tattlers, fogies, or blunt
---Whatever swag we chance for toget,
8 "All is fish that comes to net."
---Mind your eye, and draw the yokel,
10 Don’t disturb or use the folk ill.
---Keep a look out, if the beaks are nigh,
12 And cut your stick, before they’re 'fly'.
---As I vas a crossing St James’s Park
14 I met a swell, a well-togg’d spark.
---I stops a bit: then toddled quicker,
16 I’d prigged his reader, drawn his ticker;
---Then he calls — 'Stop thief!' thinks I, my master,
18 That’s a hintto me to mizzle faster.


---- Loved it.

Reminded me of some work by Patton that he let me have with me. T. E. Patton (co-author with Stampe of "The rudiments of meaning: Ziff on Grice" has some extended treatment of the way one can read Kripke as 'misusing' some of the main Gricean ideas. I will comment in more detail on that. But Kripke's example is -- as I rely on memory:


---- "The cops are around the corner"
(said by one thief to the other).

Kripke argues that the conversational implicature is that the addresse should come to believe that they should split and in any case stop collecting any further booty. Patton diagrees on the strenght that the addressee will come up to believe that, regardless of the first intention by the first thief to communicate just that.

In your poem, the 'hint' works exactly like that

"Stop the thief!" -- a 'hint'? -- That is genial.

---

"Hint", I take, and also D. Holdcroft, in "Forms of Indirect Communication" (Journal of Rhetoric) -- I love Holdcroft -- as yet another verb for which 'implicate' is to do 'general duty' ("implies," "means," "suggests", -- and 'hints').

So the rhetoric here is that the robee never HINTED. He said to any passing cop that they should be stopping the thief. The hint was not FROM the utterer. But the effect on the thief was to walk faster. Genial. Un-Gricean on the whole but once you read it Griceanly you catch the 'implicature' of the poet and the 'poetic person'. Etc.