Tacky Senses

"And they are all made of ticky tacky And they all just look the same" (Reynolds, song, "Little Boxes" -- cited by Quinion).


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

The Sense of Tack.

"When Occam said", 'Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem?' -- "was he talking balls?".

Suppose I say, "one ball exists. Two balls exist". I have multiplied an entity (a ball, to be more precise). Occam does not seem to be necessarily concerned with balls. Rather with 'types' of entity. His was an attack of the Irish philosopher Scott (or Scot the Duns -- recall Yeatman and Sellars: Scots are from Ireland, Irish from Scotland -- Picts) -- etc.

Scot had said that there's a chair, and there's Chairness (or Chairhood). Occam objected -- who called his thing a razor is disputed. Schiffer applied GRICE's Modified occam,, 'do not multiply SENSES beyond neceesity' ('Sensa') to his own view of the world and came with what he called the "Schiffer after shave" (For Quine, the razor is used to cut Plato's beards -- sice in plural).

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So when we say, "Senses ARE NOT to be multiplied' we don't necessary believe POLYSEMY exists --. "How can it NOT exist? Otherwise you'd say, "THE" sense should not be multiplied. The implicature of the plural, there, already defeats uniguity". Or something.

Senses are a terrible thing to waste (like a mind -- cfr. "A waist is a terrible thing to mind").

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This from Quinion (today -- World Wide Words). Note his two points: 'the existence of sense S1 at date T1 indicates that implicata are to be expected', or something, and 'what sense came earlier?'. These points are avoided by embracing Grice-ianism:

He is writing, in reply to a reader, about 'tacky'. I never knew what THAT meant, and my friend, John Glyn Ffoulkes-Jones said, unpoetically: "Blackpool. Blackpool is tacky". I KNEW what he meant better than he could have tried an INTENSIONAL definition. Of course I do not SHARE HIS view. I think Blackpool is CHARMING. But, under the circumstances, I think I know what he meant. He can be one bit of a big snob -- Or not.

Quinion relates to this idea that 'tacky' is related to a 'horse'. As when they say in Buenos Ayres -- "He is a bit of a medio pelo". Here, too, the horse reference is apt. (There is currently a beautiful exhibition of polo horses in the middle of Buenos Aires -- polo grounds -- as I write this).

Quinion:

"The link with horses might lead to the idea that ['tacky'] [why is it that I feel like EMBRACING Quinion and give him a Griceian kiss on his cheeck when I read him? He has MY sense of good sense -- and his prose style is so endearing. He makes silly points sound important and never fails to amuse me -- of course there are NO silly points -- and he should quote Grice more often] has something to do with "tack" for horse harness, but the one can't have led to the other, not least because "tack" in this sense dates only from the 1920s (it's an abbreviation of "tackle")."

This seems to beg a question. I submit that it is TRUE that if one thing is alleged to have TWO senses, s1, prior in record to s2, should be MORE GENERAL. But I'm not sure. I could imagine that the first Roman who used "ens" (entity) just meant, say, a horse ("Get this thing out of here" -- cfr. Lord Berners who had tea with team IN DOORS -- Rude).

But what motivated me to share with with The Club is rather the tag to that. Quinion adds:

"Web sites about the breed sometimes

suggest that "tacky" is from an

English word meaning "cheap" or "common",

but it's the other way round - the

adjective "tacky" in this sense

certainly derives from

the name for the horse."


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Only it's not really a 'name-name'. The other day I was reading Andy Capp (it features in The Buenos Ayres Herald, if you can believe that):

WIFE: What was the name of that
horse that we put our money on
and came out last?

ANDY: "Speed of Light".

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ANDY: "Either it was his offday today
or its owner was being ironic".



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Not terribly amusing, -- not too Griceanly subtle, right? -- or I may be missing something. But anyway, "Speed of Light" is what I call 'the name of a horse'. "Tacky" I call the name of a BREED of a horse. And NOT a thoroughbred for what counts (ALL that counts) so I won't expect a horse owner would be so IDIOTIC (never mind sarcastic -- the word used by Capp, incidentally) and call his thoroughbred 'Tacky'. But back to Quinion:

(Adapted now):

Authority A on 'x' "suggest that "tacky" is from an
English word meaning "cheap" or "common", but
it's the other way round - the adjective "tacky"
in this sense certainly derives from
the name for the horse."

This is some type of thing that Horn and many others have discussed. And Horn NOT necessarily endorsing the wholly Griceian view I would have him endorse (cfr. Traugott for perhaps a more Gricean of a view -- I refer to the 'parsimony' of senses, etc.).

"Deer" -- to mean 'animal'.

THIS WAS the original 'sense'. If it means, nowadays, in English, 'cervus cervus'. That's because that idiot that Henry Hunt was (referred to by Quinion in a different context) would come back from his daily shooting,

"Some animals here".

--- He meant, of course, 'deer' -- but he was being sarcastic. He was using a counter-implicature.

To say,

"Here are some (dead) specimens of Cervus cervus" is a BORING thing to say. "Here are some animals" seems more 'masculine': more detached: less informative than is required.

Surely, trust his cook -- a female -- to decode or work on the counterimplicature as follows:

"Mater Hunt said, 'Here are some animals'.

He says that every other two days.

So far, he has only brought dead items of cervus Cervus.

There is no reason to suppose Master Hunt is
not abiding by the Gricean maxims.

By 'animal' he means, not 'animal', but 'cervus cervus'"

HER SILLY ABUDCTIONS stuck.

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When I was in Amsterdam I recall a nice placard in a trolley. I was meaning to learn Dutch -- and had to go to the "T. I." (the "Tropical Institute", as it reads -- a rather expensive institution. I ended up enrolling at the literally not so literally "V. U." (Free University) and having private tuition by my master). The placard depicted an ostrich with her 'brood' and it read, in Dutch:

"There's always something new at the Zoo".

Now, the Dutch for "Zoo" (as it is in German) is literally, a garden of deer. I KNEW THAT, so I wasn't so IDIOTIC as to think that the designer of the placard was meaning that an ostrich and her brood are specimens of Cervus cervus?

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There are of course, inverse counter-implicatures, which are thus common-or-garden implicatures.

"He is drunk"

(Sp. "Es bebido", "Ha bebido").

Not that he has drunk water. This is like Korta, "I'm not drunk -- I haven't drunk anything". She must mean, 'as per to-day'. But cfr. Diana Ross in Greenwich. She is the uppermost privileged lot of them all: she lives in a paradise on earth: a mansion in a gated community in the best of the creme de la creme -- some safe 20 minutes from the best of Manhattan: glorious countryside, country club meets yacht club. And yet she is every now and then (poor soul) reported as being 'U. I.', or "D. U. I.", to be more informative than is required. Again, the influence is not just a liquid influence. People SHOULD use 'H-C-O-C-H' to mean it. "Let's have a drink sometimes" NEVER, Grice says, means "Let's have some water". I disagree. Matter of fact, that's not Grice. That's SCHIFFER reporting Grice. He (Schiffer) says that Grice says that "Let's meet and have lunch sometime", as UTTERED IN Oxford means NOT what it says. I disagree. They ARE SPECIAL and they CAN be rude, but it's more likely that Schiffer is, typically, overinterpreting things (with a vengeance). -- Similarly, he says that one of the idylls he endures from moving from his native Atlantic City to Arizona and now Manhattan is that "I can run" (he means jog in Central Park). Etc.