Senseless Aunt Matilda

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

--- I once wrote, some time ago, a thing called "Aunt Matilda". I keep it and intend to pdf it soon (or late). I now qualify the thing to 'senseless'. It's Grice's idea of


"runt".



This has a strict 'sense' -- the only one really. As in "Charlotte's Web": 'the runt of the litter'. But it can also mean, Grice notes,

"undersized person".

---

(This is metaphoric: it is a mere extension of the only sense -- as applied to a man, or female, or 'person' more generally -- can be girl or boy --. The important thing is that we add the feature "HUMAN". He has his prim and proper Aunt Matilda to perfectly (if you let me split) know that, but yet be totally unwilling to utter, even on request,



----- "Now, he IS some runt -- that fellow over there".



---

Now consider Quinion's example, regarding 'tacky':

"The link [between 'tacky' horse and 'tacky' simpliciter]
seems to have been the idea of a
lack of breeding, since the ['tacky'] horses weren't
considered to be of high quality (one writer called
them "scrubby" [Quinion is referring to the International
Association of Tacky Breeders.org.]). Later in the
century, "tacky" became a term for a "poor white"
inhabitant of the southern states".

This should amuse, or something, J. Kennedy. As he notes, in Memphis, which is not even the South, "There has been a duplication of the percentage of the Black population in the neighborhood" as a placard often displayed (in this neighbourhood of German 'village' -- they wouldn't use 'black', etc). Ditto, I had a bad friend who referred to things like 'white tr*sh' and 'w*iggers' (as being isomorphic). So here we may have a case of something pretty logical (x is white and x is poor, => x is 'tacky').

But I expect that people report 'senses' more often that they should. It's like the dictionary --. Someone one contacted me offlist in antoher fora: "I tried a search for your reference but only retrieved another one by you -- this reminds me of Hardy on being asked for the meaning of a term, -- on someone finding it 'rude' -- and Hardy referring to the dictionary -- the OED -- which quoted HARDY as being using it. Hardy was appealing to the dictionary as 'authority on good use', or something).

We Kant count 'mentioned' 'senses' like that. We need USED senses (if there are such). We need contexts that do use 'tacky' to MEAN 'white poor'. We don't want paraphrase, that is over-general. It's like, ... we don't want Aunt Matilda to do the dictionary for us! Or something.

So back to Quinion -- and I'm quoting from his excellent "World Wide Words" this week:

"The link [between 'tacky' horse and 'tacky' simpliciter]
seems to have been the idea of a
lack of breeding, since the ['tacky'] horses weren't
considered to be of high quality (one writer called
them "scrubby" [Quinion is referring to the International
Association of Tacky Breeders.org.]). Later in the
century, "tacky" became a term for a "poor white"
inhabitant of the southern states".

So. Supposing this means 1880s, (I haven't checked what century that is!) we expect something like:

1880. Louisianna Villager. "And the pub was proliferated with the tackies'"

---- Or something. The most a lexicographer can do is:

'tacky.' Etym.

---- etc.
---- We are not talking 'senses' here.
-As appplied to horse: 'bad'.
-- Extended to people: "Lots of tackies in the pub". ("The connotation seems to be that, having seen the pub -- it caters for the white poor, so THAT is what 'tacky' means." But of course it doesn't. So the more strict 'definiens' seems to be uncalled for. Of course you can have a pedant (NOT our charming Matilda) who will say, "In some southern states, 'tacky' DOES mean 'white poor'" But people are not Griceian when we want them to be (Recall, for Grice, and for everyone with a bit of sense: what a word means is what we mean by it -- "Meaning" in Way of Words, Harvard, 1989). They'll never (unless they are philosophers, and Griceians of the right sort at that) go into details. At most we may expect a Dr. Johnson (D. Ph. Heidelbergensis if you must!) or a Noah Webster (whose grave in New Haven is a site -- the man could NOT write about 'the South') going patronising and writing things like, "My dictionary records descriptions of use." and then under 'tacky', as first expounded in "Proceedings of the New England Association for Lexicology", "The word 'tacky' -- "has undergone a semantic broadening." "From a bad horse it now means a bad sort of human. Which in the Southern States reads as 'white and poor'".

--- Or not.

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