I like that the Green Grocer announces his name so often. Maybe if all the characters did that sort of thing, people would find it easier to remember who's who.

Sometimes people ask me if philosophy of language has any practical applications. They are usually asking it rhetorically, or the way that similar to asking rhetorically, but more as an insult than as an actual rhetorical maneuver. I have an answer for them, though, whether they want it or not.

Let's say you're reading an article on Wikipedia, and for whatever reason, some stupid dispute about neutrality resulted in the article reading like this, "Some have claimed that 2 is the only even prime number, but this is not accepted by all mathematicians." Well, pragmatics is what philosophers of language and linguists call it when there is more to what you conveyed than the literal meaning of your words. And it provides a formal basis to explain why phrasing the claim that way, even if it is literally true, is highly misleading. For example, in this case, it is because making the weak statement that some people have claimed 2 to be the only even prime suggests that the stronger statement that 2 is the only even prime number isn't warranted. So the attempt to state things neutrally tends to indicate a pretty strong skepticism. While this isn't shocking, what is shocking is the awesomely systematic way in which these implications seem to get generated. So remember, if someone asks why philosophy of language is useful, the answer is that it gives us a way to explain why the articles on Wikipedia sound so silly all the time.

Bonus points to anyone who can successfully get Wikipedia to adopt language like this in the articles for primes and the number 2.