Interestinger and interestinger: the implicature

Speranza

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


http://www.worldwidewords.org. World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 2013.

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In "The Golden Egg" Donna Leon has Commissario Brunetti (an Italian) utter,


"Interestinger and interestinger".

Quinion comments: "English grammar didn’t allow the creation of a comparative in -er from such a long word, other than for humorous effect."

The implicature at play seems complicated. Because it's one thing what Donna Leon IMPLICATES and what Commissario Brunetti does.

Note that in symbols of logic, comparatives are a problem _per se_.

Quinion goes on:

"I’d not encountered it before, but found many examples, mostly from recent decades, though the oldest was from New Outlook, an American magazine of 1909. Online, it has been attributed to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, though what Alice actually said, of course, was curiouser and curiouser. The interestinger and interestinger version was presumably created by analogy with it."

Or not.

In "A nice derangement of epitaphs", D. Davidson (in the Grice festschrift) writes that 'language' is an abstraction, and so is 'grammar':

"grammar does not allow 'interestinger and interestinger'. But Commissario Brunetti's idiolect-meaning procedures presumably do!

Still, there must be a conversational maxim we can appeal to here, or not!