Grice's flights of whimsy

J in 'meaning =/= use':

"Get thee to a nunnery!" said Hamlet to Ophelia. Read the footnote and some Oxbridge type informs you that "nunnery" was also slang for...whorehouse at the time. Same for spanish and phrench to some degree (tho' it's quite difficult for most Mericans to pick up on a parisian's wit). Double-entendre, as they say. But I don't think that's a topic most academic philo-types address. They want the language controlled at all time, except perhaps for the flights of whimsy typical of Oxbridge."

Yes.

My favourite flight is A. G. N. Flew's: when he refers to Humpty Dumpty as an anarcho-semanticist.

And if Grice was never admired by Husserl that may be perhaps because Grice DID show an interest in 'those topics' -- such as 'nunnery' = 'whorehouse' via 'conversational implicature'"

My favourite example must be:

grass: material of which lawn is made.
------ Also: marijuana

"To help the grass to grow": to assist in the production of marijuana". Also: to be dead.

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There are various options here -- it's discussed in "Studies in the Way of Words", chapter 5.

"He is helping the grass to grow"

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means:

'He is dead'
'He is assisting the material of which lawns are composed to mature'
'He is assisting marijuana to mature.'


It would be hard to think of a situation where ambiguity springs at that level. Especially, since Grice uses the first person, in future tense:

"I shall be helping the grass to grow"

And also adds it as a protasis of a conditional:

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

He notes that "I shall have no time for reading" does not mean what it says, -- strictly, that he will have no time for ANYTHING -- never mind 'reading'. He suggests it means that he 'will be freed from the troubles of the world'.

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His main euphemism, unlike mine, which is "make love", was 'die'.

He noted other variants:

"At this point, he joined the heavenly choir"

---- "Since no such thing exists, the implicatum is that he died."

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He had a problem with two idioms meaning 'to be dead':

"pushing up the daisies"

---- This he found 'vulgar' -- "too established an idiom". He would prefer,

"fertilising the daffodils".

"'Fertilising the daffodils" is less of a cliche, and so, my little niece may have it wrong, which I would enjoy".

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He also diskliked "kick the bucket".

In general, he preferred idioms that related to the 'event' of 'being dead' (e.g. 'fertilising the daffodils' -- which takes time) to those related to the briefer 'event' of 'dying' ('to kick the bucket' only takes, say, 2 seconds).

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So, Grice would be the GREAT exception to a philosopher
who did not care about such nuances.

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Of course he only cared about those things to irritate Strawson.

---- and perhaps himself when writing "Causal theory of perception".





For if 'push up the daisies' means what it means (i.e. to move the genus margherita margherita towards a higher position) it can also be 'used' to mean 'to be dead'. This is via

metaphtonymy

---- Grice explicitly has 'metaphor' as conversational implicature. It works via implicature BUT also 'disimplicature':

"You are the cream in my coffee"

Since it is hardly meant that you are a white liquid, the idea is that you 'drop' that entailment ("Cream is a white liquid, derived from the cow") and work out a similar proposition -- less informative, no doubt:

--- You are LIKE the cream in my coffee.

On the assumption that the utterer LIKES the cream in his coffee, the implicature then is yielded: "you are my pride and joy".

A friend, M. Attleo, suggested that since cream is high in cholesterol, it means that you are my 'bane'.

Grice prefers that meaning to be derived via "implicating" an irony ON the 'metaphorical' implicatum.

His example:

"He is SUCH a FINE friend" -- said of a scoundrel. THe irony is of course that he is NOT a fine friend. Similarly, an obvious compliment, like "You are the cream in my coffee" may mean 'you are my bane'.

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There are other examples, but in general, metaphor and metonymy (conversational implicata) are then attached to the 'meaning' of expressions.

My favourite is 'gay'.

"Gay" meant 'cheerful', but by 1880, in London, it was started to be used for 'female prostitutes': "We saw a lot of gay ladies around the Piccadilly area". The implication (or entailment) cannot be that these ladies were cheerful -- it was more the AREA where they were standing and their attitude. Now, in this case, there seems to be a 'semantic' connection: a prostitute is supposed to be cheerful.

Later on the term started to mean 'someone who enjoys the sexual company of one's own sex' -- e.g. lesbian -- but Quentin Crisp objected: "By the acquaintance of some of my friends, 'sads' would be a better descript'".

Or take my favourite, 'make love', and parts of the 'body'. "Gay" is such an ellusive term that there is NO WAY to just "EX-plicate" what you mean. So you are bound to use an 'implicature' (a metaphor, metonymy, or synechdoche). Perhaps the same applies to 'make love' (which is a euphemism). In this case, an Anglo-Saxon type may claim that the F-word is the one that EX-plicates what all the other 'implicate' (via metaphor or metonymy or metaphtonymy), and I would agree.

Even the f-word has been criticised -- by Dale Spender, typically -- as sexist. While it is possible to say, in describing an event, that she f-ed him, Spender notes that there is an 'implicatum' of the type carried by the mere 'active' versus 'passive' voice --. She lived many years in Australia (in fact she is Australian) and notes that in the aboriginal languages, the f-word is not used in the 'active' voice like that -- or the 'passive'. "Australian aboriginal languages lack a voice," she concludes.

(They use, alas, the middle finger).