But we must now inquire more closely into the meaning of such
phrases. If X is a short man, does this mean that he is short and a
man? Not necessarily; for he might be fairly tall...for a woman, say,
or a child. All we can surmise is that he is short for a man; that
is, a short type of man. What about blue houses? And beautiful
swimmers? Can we expect them to be really blue? And really beautiful?
All over? Inside and out? Certainly not; for blue houses and
beautiful swimmers, like short men, are blue for houses and beautiful
as swimmers. That is, they are blue among houses and not among skies,
and it is their swimming that is beautiful, never mind their eyes.
And good mothers? Good as mothers, perhaps, but not necessarily good
cooks or good wives. And so on.22
Clearly we are dealing here with metaphorical extensions of primitive
ideas. We know what a mother is, and a man and a house. And we know
what good, blue, beautiful and short mean, as primitive ideas. The
first time we hear the metaphor 'good mother' we are in a fair
position to guess what the speaker means, from our knowledge of the
uses of these simple predicates in the language. But we cannot be
sure. Neither--until one has seen one--can one be sure what a blue
house is. How blue does a house have to be to be blue? How short is a
short man? More puzzlingly, how watery is a water-pistol? How
intellectual is an intellectual dwarf? And what is a bicycle pump
anyway? Does it pump bicycles? Into what?
In Loglan we surmise, with most logicians, that such questions are
unanswerable by direct analysis. We suppose that the meanings of
predicate expressions formed of two or more constituent predicate
ideas are like the meanings of simple predicates themselves:
essentially unitary and unanalyzable.23 A blue house is...well, a
blue house. Like houses themselves, or blue things, you have to be
shown one to really know. And intellectual dwarfs? Well, here again
it is not the art of logical inference, but a sense of irony that
helps one to understand this phrase; that and having heard the phrase
'intellectual giant', with which it strongly contrasts. And bicycle
pumps? Again, the knowledge that bicycles have pneumatic tires might
help the auditor guess what this metaphor means; and so on. But we
are doing more than arguing for the utility of use and custom in
understanding such phrases; we should also insist that all such
modifier-modified pairs are metaphors, the humblest as well as the
most exotic and obscure. And that the original occasions of their use
represented, at those moments, the extension of the semantic
machinery of the language into regions then unknown. Red houses and
short men are commonplace, now. But we suppose they were not once.
Water pistols are now commonplace. But we know they were not before
someone invented and then named that innocent, modern contrivance.
Star-sailors are not commonplace; but the word 'astronaut' is and
they may be. So language grows. New predicates arise. And we suppose
that the first step in that process is the coining of fresh metaphor,
and that this always involves the "misuse" of some old word.24