Grice To Your Mill

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Grice did like to play with puns, as it were. And we have, from his own hand, this

"so as not to be just Grice to your Mill"

-- that amused Chapman (p. 8).

As Kramer notes, we have an idiom here -- which are boringly rendered, lexicologically as "one" rather than "your" as Grice has it above:

From an online source:

—Idiom. grist for or to one's mill,

MEANING:

something employed to one's profit or advantage,


ESPECIALLY:

something seemingly unpromising:

Example: (invented, no doubt: this is NOT a good dic(tionary):

"Every delay was so much more grist for her mill."

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I fail to see why the 'something seemingly unpromising' thing might have generated, and not because I'm a Gristean.

--- Grice considers other idioms and I have discussed them elsewhere -- vis a vis his charming collocation:

"established idiom" -- established by custom rather than by my uncle he means:

He is considering the implicatures of death,

vis a vis:

He's pushing up the daisies.

versus -- to ironize with L. M. Tapper -- vide his comment on "She has, as usual, a bee in her bonnet".

Grice is confronting the above ("He's pushing up the daisies") with:

"He is helping the grass to grow" -- as in the protasis of


"If I shall then be helping the grass to grow,
I shall have no time for reading"

-- Surely, he writes, "We are not meaning that if I'm seriously engaged in the cultivation of cannabis I could not care less for "The Times"".

Yet, he is uncomfortable, for

"On the assumption, perhaps unguarded, which I make, that the phrase, 'to help the grass to grow, unlike 'to push up the daisies' is not a recognised idiom -- cfr. 'established idiom' --," the implicature may be harder to retrieve.

Etc.


In this particular context,

Grice is discussing VALUE.

He sees it as part of HUMAN NATURE.

But he notes that J. S. Mill is perhaps antagonistic towards that move.

Chapman elaborates:

"Grice was NOT averse to jotting down
what he once described as useful verbiage"

-- especially if you're having a blog in mind --

"in preparation for this or that." (Usually
a lecture which were agonies for him, or rather
lecturing was -- but a sweet sorrow, though --)

-- "In conjunction", Chapman continues, "with some work on the place of value in human nature

DRAWING ON

but [SEEMINGLY UNPROMISINGLY? JLS -- don't think so!]

diverging", Chapman notes, "from a number of previous philosophers including John Stuart Mill, he noted down the phrase."

"so as not to be just Grice to your Mill"

(note here). Note there. Note everywhere. (almost)
Etc.

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