ABSTRACT
Logicians, of course, see this, but they dismiss it with some remark like this (Keynes FL 45): "Proper names, of course, become connotative when they are used to designate a certain type of person i for example, a Diogenes, a Thomas, a Don Quixote, a Paul Pry, a Benedick, a Socrates. But, when so used, such names have really ceased to be proper names at all i they have come to possess all the characteristics of general IL.'l.mes." The logician as such with his predilection for water-tight compartments in the realm of ideas, is not concerned with what to me as a linguist seems a most important question, viz. how is it to be explained that a sequence of sounds with no meaning at all suddenly from non-connotative becomes connotative, and that this new full meaning is at once accepted by the whole speaking community 1
If we take the view suggested above, this difficulty vanishes at once. For what has happened is simply this, that out of the complex of qualities characteristic of the bearer of the name concerned (and, as I should say, really connoted by the name) one quality is selected as the best known, and used to characterize some other being or thing possessed of the same quality. But this is exactly the same process that we see so very often in common names, as when a bell-shaped flower is called a bell, however different it is in other respects from a real bell, or when some politician is called an old fox, or when we say that pearl, or jewel, of a woman. The transference in the case of original proper names is due to the same cause as in the case of common names, viz. their connotativeness, and the difference between the two classes is thus seen to be one of degree only.
