A hoot for what Richard Snary says

by JLS
for the GC

Grice writes in "Reply to Richards" (in Grandy/Warner) of having told Austin, "I don't care what the dictionary says". Chapman, when transcribing a tape of a public lecture given by Grice to the American Philosophical Association, has the line, as

"I told Austin that I didn't give a hoot what the dictionary said".

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Anyway, this from today's World Wide Words, online:

Today's "weird word" being "Richard Snary"

Quinion comments: "This was a seventeenth-century pun, even more convoluted than most of its kind."

"I encountered it as one of the entries in
this month's revisions to the OED
online." "A Richard Snary is a dictionary."

The locus classicus being, Grose, "The Vulgar Tongue" (1796):

"A country lad, having been reproved for calling
persons by their [first] names, being sent by his
master to borrow a dictionary, thought to show his
breeding by asking for
"a Richard Snary."

An earlier variant being from Hawkins, "Apollo Shroving,
composed for the schollars of the free-schoole of
Hadleigh in Suffolke", 1627:

"Talke not to me of Dick snary, nor
Richard-snary; I care not how little
I come neare them."

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In any case, Grice always treasured Austin's reply:

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