"I don't give a hoot what the dictionary says"

by J. L. Speranza, Esq. F. R. S. (failed) &c.

for the Grice Circle, &c.


* * * *


Grice could be seen to lose his patience on occasion. Once he was discussing with Austin on the 'marvelties' of the English Language, as evidenced in such a rich book as the OED is,

"Frankly, I don't give a hoot what the dictionary says"

--- heard by Chapman in Tape, BANC 90/135c -- cited in her _Grice_ --

"And that's where you make your big mistake".

In his calmer, "Prejudices and predilections, which become the life and opinions of Paul Grice," Paul Grice turns the hoot to:

"I don't CARE what the dictionary says"

-- While Austin's remark remains _verbatim_.

Now since I'm unburying things from files and retrieving them to the Club I come across this


---- BEGIN FORWARDED / COPIED & PASTED MESSAGE:


Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2001
To: American Dialect Society
From: Laurence Horn
Subject: gap in the OED

attention Jesse (et al.):

As an Argentinian colleague, J. L. Speranza, just alerted me, the OED
(on-line and printed) contains no entry for "implicature", the most
important term in pragmatic theory and one that's been around since
at least 1967 (when H. P. Grice's William James lectures were first
delivered and circulated). I'm not sure when the first published
cite would be; the term was already pretty old hat when I used it
umpteen times in my 1972 dissertation, but Grice's lectures didn't
appear in print until 1975. The AHD4 entry is pretty solid--

Linguistics [Why not "Philosophy" too?]
1. The aspect of meaning that a speaker conveys, implies, or suggests
without directly
expressing. Although the utterance "Can you pass the salt?" is
literally a request for
information about one's ability to pass salt, the understood
implicature is a request for
salt.
2. The process by which such a meaning is conveyed, implied, or suggested. In
saying "Some dogs are mammals," the speaker conveys by implicature that not
all
dogs are mammals.

--but curiously omits any attribution to Grice, the originator of the
term. (As it happens, the example in #2 comes from my own work--I
seem to recall that the AHD entry is due to our own Steve Kleinedler,
and there was no such entry in AHD3--but I was just using it to
illustrate Grice's concept.)

The AHD4 entry for the verb "implicate" also contains a sense
corresponding to the base of this noun--'To convey, imply, or suggest
by implicature'--and this Gricean sense is also missing from the OED
entry, although other, older senses of "implicate" are given.

I know these items aren't as tasty as some of Barry's delectabilia,
but they're pretty important in their own way. Jesse?

larry

=======


Etc.


the current OED3 has quotes by Pears (provided by yours truly) and a few others.

"don't give two hoots"?

Etc.

JLS