Quinion self-sics but provides no cancellation

by JLS
for the GC

---

From today's World Wide Words, by M. Quinion:

The biter bit: lots of readers wrote in about my etymology of the
word "cab", which I described as "a contraction of cabriolet, a
light two-wheeled vehicle drawn by one horse that had been around
since the middle of the seventeenth century in France, but which
had first appeared for hire in London in 1823." The consensus was
that it must have been a well-preserved and much-travelled horse.

---

Alas, M. Quinion does not provide a variant that lacks the unwanted 'implicature'. Cfr. Grice:

"I met one woman this morning"

which agrees with his having breakfast with his own wife.

Pei notes that while the old Romans were already using "unus, una, unum" indefinitely, it is still a bother to account for this 'generalised implicature', Grice calls it, in say, Italian, -- where "uno" besides _saying_ the Arabic "1", implies, the logical quantifier (Ex). Or something.