Grice's paperweight, "MOTHER"

This below from today's World Wide Words, ed. M. Quinion. Grice considers and dismisses a multi-task (Wittgensteian) account of words. "Words are to communicate," and that's it.

He refers to his paperweight, which reads "MOTHER". "It would be otiose to say that I use 'mother' to disallow the wind to have my papers flying all over the garden."

(Strand 5, WoW)


Unitasker
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A unitasker is a tool or device that does only one thing. Before it
meant that, it was a dismissive term for a person who does one job
at a time before moving to the next, the opposite of a multitasker.

It's one of those slow-burn words that seems to be creeping up on
us in a variety of fields, becoming accepted because it's a useful
term of abuse to describe those gadgets we buy because they seem
like a good idea at the time. This is despite experience teaching
us that their advantages don't justify their cost or the space they
take up or that a general-purpose item could do the job as well.
It's used in particular for specialist kitchen gadgets (electric
gravy boat warmers, strawberry slicers, watermelon knives) and odd
computing contraptions (USB foot warmers). "Unitasker" has been
popularised by the American TV chef Alton Brown and the website
unclutterer.com.

Not all unitaskers are bad, of course; some of them are invaluable
and their limitations are a strength, not a weakness. What's wrong
with a fire extinguisher? It does one job well. (OK, you can use it
to prop the door open or brain a burglar, but we're talking about
intended uses here.) And one person's useless unitasker is
another's onion-ring holder or USB fragrance oil burner.

While I'm skeptical of tools intended for only one
purpose, I like the Kindle because it's a unitasker. You
can't really use it for the Web or Twitter or e-mail:
It's for reading and that's it.
[Macworld; Dec. 2010.]