Grecians and Griceans on the etymon

We are discussing 'sanction' which can have a couple of different, slightly antagonistic 'usages' in current speech.

Regarding an ur-meaning, sanctus-facere behind all utterer's intentions, Kramer writes:

[But] "sanction" [no longer means] "make holy."
We have "sanctify" and "hallow" for that now.
Yet "make holy" is the definition of sanction
that makes it a good choice for the uses it
now has. What's your take on that?"

Yes, that's good. I usually, as you can imagine, get usually challenge: "Wrong: 'meant', not 'means'". I keep using 'mean' as in the historical present, i.e. in the present but with a passee 'sense'. I guess I am like that little old lady who refuses to use 'gay' to mean 'homosexual': "Surely a new fashion is not going to inhibit my dear old mother, as I read her letters to me, to be talking to me about illegal sex", or something.

It is sad that Alefric, King Alfred, Alcuin, Bede, Hengist and Horsa, once had 'hallow' and they had to, or their offspring, had to replace it by sanctus-facere. But I'm rambling. I mean, in the Romance cases, it's the very same CONTINUITY we are talking about here.

So, I wouldn't know about choices regarding 'sanction'. In the Romance we have no choice: it's sanction or sanction. We don't have 'hallow'. Etc.

So here we should distinguish:

the Grecian take on the 'etymon'. They were pretty narrow-minded (indeed petty) when it came to 'barbaros' versus _us_. Plato's Kratyl is a good example here. So, the nomo-thetes, as he calls him, the man who named them all, was right and all around we see is "change and decay" now (words to "Abide with me").

the Gricean take. Slightly different. He was an Anglo-phone so he wasn't too buried about loanwords from the Graeco-Romans. ("Loanword? We never gave them back, have we?"). He was onto reductive analysis of concepts, in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and at most aimed at defining an item -- e.g. 'sanction' -- in ways that would NOT make use of the term -- on risk of circularity. If the analysis if of 'timeless' expression-meaning that's one thing, if it's of utterer's occasion-meaning that's another.

A word gets meaning because it means thing for people (Grice "Meaning", 1948):

"x meant something is (roughly) equivalent to "Somebody meant-nn something by x". "x means-nn(timeless) that so-and-so" might AS A FIRST SHOT be equated with some statement or disjunction of statements about what "people" (vague) intend (with qualifications about 'recognition') to effect by x."

In my "studies and investigations" thing, I expand on that -- which I call a 'minor' problem, trading on Grice on minor/major problems in his WoW:MR. But the thing is or was hot back then at Oxford: Loar's DPhil on Sentence-Meaning, problems with quantifications over populations ('people'), diachronic continuity, etc.

---- Etc.

The modern lexicographer is the anti-Gricean, or perhaps not. The anti-Grice, rather. He thinks he can get away with a square bracket: bugger: [bulgarian], or with a silly uninformative thing alla [etym. unkn.].

Etc.