"He is a runt," Grice's Aunt Matilda thought

Grice considers,

"he is a runt".

NOT to mean, literally, what it may mean ('the runt of the litter') but metaphorically, an oversized person.

He wants to say that some people may know what words mean but never use them (his prim and proper Aunt Matilda). So it cannot be that, as Wittgenstein said, 'meaning is use'.

But cfr.

'piss poor'.

An utterer may use this expression because it means something whereas it means something else.

From the pages of today's use of M. Quinion's "World Wide Words".


Q.

"An item circulating online under the title Interesting History
claims, "They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families
used to all pee in a pot and then once a day it was sold to the
tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were 'piss poor'."
This screams of folk etymology. Can you offer real clarity? [Bob
Fleck]"

Quinion's answer includes:

"[T]he expression "piss-poor" is recent and has nothing to do
with tanning. The current state of research suggests it may have
been invented during World War Two, because the first examples in
print date from 1946. Though it is still classed as low slang by
dictionaries, its mildly unpleasant associations have become
blunted by time and familiarity."

"The origin is straightforward. "Piss" began to be attached to other
words during the twentieth century to intensify their meaning. Ezra
Pound invented "piss-rotten" in 1940 (the first example on record)
and since then we've had "piss-easy" (very easy), "piss-elegant"
(affectedly refined, pretentious) and other forms. "Piss-poor" just
means extremely poor."

He provides one source:

"Larkin's letters, wrote Philippe Auclair, writer and
broadcaster, were "very funny, very beautiful, and very
sad; the grace of an angel, the precision of a geometer,
and the short-sighted, intolerant piss-poor idées fixes
of a provincial buffoon".
[The Spectator, 27 Nov. 2010.]"

Usually, lexicological cites like that I can't swallow. Dictionary makers quote a source as evidence that the word is used to mean M, rather than M'. But what do we know about Larkin's utterer-meaning. Perhaps he was thinking of 'piss' as, literally, 'involved in the urine-business that many families were forced to involved themselves with'. Or something.

Of course I am being thick.