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I use speaker throughout to cover writer as well.

The distinction between what a word means and what a speaker means by a word appears in its crudest form, of course, when a foreigner or imperfectly educated native is actually mistaken as to standard usage and commits a malapropism; using deprecate, say, to mean ‘depreciate’, or disinterested to mean ‘bored’, or scarify to mean ‘scare’. But this is not what I have in mind. Speaker’s meaning and word’s meaning may be distinguishable where there is no lexical mistake involved.

‘When I spoke of supper after the theatre, I meant by supper a biscuit and a cup of cocoa. But my friend meant by supper something like a cold bird and a bottle of wine.’ In this situation both parties might well have agreed on the lexical (or ‘dictionary’) meaning of supper; perhaps ‘a supernumerary meal which, if taken at all, is the last meal before bed’. In another way they ‘meant’ different things by it. The use of the verb mean both for the word’s force and for the speaker’s intention can doubtless be criticised, and distinctions could be drawn. But I am not here embarking on ‘the meaning of meaning’ nor high linguistics. That will not be necessary. To use mean thus 15 without further distinction is good English and will serve our turn.

For there is only one reason why the difference between the speaker’s and the word’s meaning concerns us. It is this. If some speaker’s meaning becomes very common it will in the end establish itself as one of the word’s meanings; this is one of the ways in which semantic ramification comes about.

For thousands of Englishmen today the word furniture has only one sense—a (not very easily definable) class of domestic movables. And doubtless many people, if they should read Berkeley’s ‘all the choir of heaven and furniture of earth’, would take this use of furniture to be a metaphorical application of the sense they know—that which is to earth as tables and chairs and so forth are to a house. Even those who know the larger meaning of the word (whatever ‘furnishes’ in the sense of stocking, equipping, or replenishing) would certainly admit ‘domestic movables’ as one of its senses. It would in fact, by my system, be furniture (d.s.). But it must have become one of the word’s meanings by being a very common speaker’s meaning. Men who said ‘my furniture’ were often in fact, within that context, referring to their domestic movables. The word did not yet mean that; they meant it. When I say ‘Take away this rubbish’ I usually ‘mean’ these piles of old newspapers, magazines, and Christmas cards. That is not what the word rubbish means. But if a sufficiently large number of people shared my distaste for that sort of litter, and applied the word rubbish to it often enough, the word might come to have 16 this as one of its senses. So with furniture, which, from being a speaker’s meaning, has established itself so firmly as one of the word’s meanings that it has ousted all the others in popular speech.

Estate is acquiring the dominant sense ‘building estate’ in our own time by just the same process. Morality and immorality have in the same way come to mean ‘chastity’ and ‘lechery’. These are the forms of virtue and vice which both the prudish and the prurient most want to talk about. And since most of us have a dash of prudery or prurience and many among us of both, we may say simply ‘which most people most want to talk about’. The speaker’s meaning of ‘all that immorality’ was so often ‘all that lechery’ that lechery becomes one of the word’s meanings; indeed, outside highly educated circles, its only meaning.

This is one of the most troublesome phenomena for the historian of a word. If you want to know when ‘domestic movables’ became one of the meanings (word’s meanings) of furniture, it is no good just finding the earliest example where the things referred to as furniture in that context obviously were in fact domestic movables. The usage might record merely a speaker’s meaning. You cannot infer a ‘word’s meaning’ any more than you can infer from my most habitual use of rubbish that rubbish (lexically) had ‘old newspapers etc.’ as one of its senses in 1958. An old writer may use the word gentle of conduct which was clearly in fact what we call gentle (mild, soft, not severe); or may use wit to describe what was clearly in fact wit (d.s.); or cattle referring to what we call ‘cattle’. But none 17 of these prove the existence of the modern word’s meaning at that date. They might all be speaker’s meanings.