A usage is a custom, practice, fashion or vogue. It can be local or widespread, obsolete or current, rural or urban, vulgar or academic. There cannot be a misusage any more than there can be a miscustom or a misvogue.By contrast, a way of operating with a razor blade, a word, a traveller's cheque or a canoe-paddle is a technique, knack or method.
[..]Descriptions of usages presuppose descriptions of use
[..]We can ask whether a person knows how to use and how not misuse a certain word. But we cannot ask whether he knows how to use a certain sentence
[..]Sentences and clauses make sense or make no sense, where words neither do nor do not make sense, but only have meanings
Inter-theory negotiations can be and may have to be conducted in pre-theory dictions.
[..] philosophers, unlike other professionals and specialists, are constantly jettisoning in toto(entirely) all the technical terms of their own predecessors
[..]A theory is formalized when it is translated out of the natural language (untechnical, technical or semi-technical), in which it was originally excogitated, into a deliberately constructed notation, the notation, perhaps of Principia Mathematica.
Tags: "usage", "use", linguistics, ordinary language, philology, ryle
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