"To Betty, the Grisette": A Gricean Analysis Line-By-Line

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As is well known by most students of Eng. Lit., Jonathan Swift, the Irish, or Anglo-Irish author, better known for "Gulliver's Travels" gives in his "To Betty, the Grisette" a rather jaundiced portrayal of the grisette and her intellectual pretensions.

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1 Queen of wit and beauty, Betty,
Never may the Muse forget ye,
How thy face charms every shepherd,
Spotted over like a leopard!

5 And thy freckled neck, display'd,
Envy breeds in every maid;
Like a fly-blown cake of tallow,
Or on parchment ink turn'd yellow;

9 Or a tawny speckled pippin,
Shrivell'd with a winter's keeping.
And, thy beauty thus dispatch'd,
Let me praise thy wit unmatch'd.

13 Sets of phrases, cut and dry,
Evermore thy tongue supply;
And thy memory is loaded
With old scraps from plays exploded;

17 Stock'd with repartees and jokes,
Suited to all Christian folks:
Shreds of wit, and senseless rhymes,
Blunder'd out a thousand times;

21 Nor wilt thou of gifts be sparing,
Which can ne'er be worse for wearing.
Picking wit among collegians,
In the playhouse upper regions;

24 Where, in the eighteen-penny gallery,
Irish nymphs learn Irish raillery.
But thy merit is thy failing,
And thy raillery is railing.

28 Thus with talents well endued
To be scurrilous and rude;
When you pertly raise your snout,
Fleer and gibe, and laugh and flout;

32 This among Hibernian asses
For sheer wit and humour passes.
Thus indulgent Chloe, bit,
Swears you have a world of wit.


--- The Gricean analysis:

"Queen of wit and beauty, Betty" -- a zeugma. "Never may the Muse forget ye" -- if she ever cared to remember thee. Implicature by default. "How thy face charms every shepherd/spotted over like a leopard!" A Grice herd, rather. "And thy freckled neck, display'd, Envy breeds in every maid; Like a fly-blown cake of tallow, Or on parchment ink turn'd yellow" Cockney rhyme there: yallow, rather. "Or a tawny speckled pippin, Shrivell'd with a winter's keeping", or 'keepin'" as I prefer. "And, thy beauty thus dispatch'd, Let me praise thy wit unmatch'd." Again, the implicature of 'damn by faint praise': Speranza's Jabberwocky essay is unmatched.

--- Betty Speaks:

"Sets of phrases, cut and dry, Evermore thy tongue supply;"

'cut': the idea of the explicit vs. the implicit. A cut phrase means an explicature. A polished lady will 'implicate' rather.

"And thy memory is loaded with old scraps from plays exploded;
Stock'd with repartees and jokes,"

This may be a reference to Barbara.


"Suited to all Christian folks:
Shreds of wit, and senseless rhymes,"

As Tim W.

"There was this chap called Speranza
who wrote a Gricean limerick three lines short of a stanza"

Blunder'd out a thousand times;
Nor wilt thou of gifts be sparing,
Which can ne'er be worse for wearing.
Picking wit among collegians,

-- oblique reference to St. John's college, Grice's college in Oxford.

In the playhouse upper regions;
Where, in the eighteen-penny gallery,
Irish nymphs learn Irish raillery.
But thy merit is thy failing,
And thy raillery is railing.

--- "thy merit is thy failig". Grice: "What another author of less wit would have this as cheap, Swift hasn't."

Thus with talents well endued
To be scurrilous and rude;
When you pertly raise your snout,
Fleer and gibe, and laugh and flout;

--- An obvious blatant ref. to the clash with the maxim of relation.

This among Hibernian asses
For sheer wit and humour passes.

--- This is sad seeing that he was one, Hibernian.

Thus indulgent Chloe, bit,
Swears you have a world of wit.

--- or a bit of world if you must.

Grice: "We may do well to focus on the twelfth quartette,

"This among Hibernian asses
For sheer wit and humour passes."

The implicature being that since the 'utterer' _is_ Hibernian, he cannot for sure be teaching _us_ as to the difference betweeen 'sheer wit and humour' and the doggerel he is his-self offering." "To avoid the complications introduced by the word 'asses', let us rephrase that as "the utterer". There may be a triple ambiguity there, raising, let's calculate, 81 different generalised implicatures,

recall
_ _ _ _
\3|
\| p

-- with 'p' as (cubic) radix.

"ass" may refer to Swift hisself, as seen by hisself, but as seen by Betty. This complicates the picture to the third power. (Hence the 81)". "Partly because the unsophistication of the poet (Swift), and partly because of INTERNAL EVIDENCE (that this poem sucks), there seems," Grice goes on, "to be no alternative to supposing that the ambiguity is _unintentional_, and that the poet hasn't got the faintest idea as to what he si conveying by either of what he is saying or implicating, if any of the 81 implicatures _were_ intended (as true). Vice versa: though no doubt the poet is not EXPLICITLY saying that he is an ass, the assumption made by the reader is the only viable one to prove it."