The Writing on the Wall

JONES in "Stay Tuned" (Comment), THIS BLOG:

"Two possibilities come to mind for addressing "speakers meaning" (or writers for that matter)."

Try using 'utter', and 'utterer', and go on, unashamedly, as Kramer has done, to abbreviate it as "U" (or 'u' if you prefer, to an utterer-token, and keep U for utterer-type -- a type of an utterer. "We know that type."

Only yesterday I was reading an essay on the difficulty of writing. They mentioned blogs, and 'walls in 'facebook'.

People overuse 'write'. Sometimes it doesn't mean what it says.

People, when they discuss "Grice for the masses" (the Grice of 'implicatura') go on to say that Grice is providing a theory on how to 'read between the lines'. This is horrid, because I wouldn't call it 'conversational' if it's about boring READING. But of course, 'intralinear' is the word here, and it's something Grice would NOT be familiar with because 'intralinear' texts were forbidden at Clifton.

You were NOT supposed to read between the lines. I wrote a short story on that, which I called, "Paul, or the Boy who would Read between the Lines", which I posted to CLASSICS-L.

Then there's the similarly obscene,

"the spirit of the letter"

and "the letter of the spirit".

I say the "moon is made of cheese". The spirit, rather than the letter, of what I say (never mind 'mean') is that I find that cute.

But this is transmogrified, for what has "Spirit" to do with this?