the psychology of Gray/Grey

[Joe Pickett]

I find these semantic distinctions between grey and gray a bit hard to pin
down. And frankly I'm skeptical about the whole business.

If my hair is going gray, does that mean it's now grey (i.e. getting there,
patchy-like)?

Is it an inevitable progression from grey to gray (assuming one's hair
stays in long enough to find out)?

It's a gray day here too.

Joe







Lynne Murphy <lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK>@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on 10/16/2000
02:01:13 PM

Please respond to American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>

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Subject:  Re: the psychology of Gray/Grey


>Well, there is the general tendency, cited by Bréal, Bolinger and
>others, to avoid full synonymy or overlap.  So if someone has seen
>"grey" and "gray" (and isn't aware of some general non-functional
>principle of differentiation operating here the way it does with the
>U.S. -or/Brit. -our spellings), one will naturally assume there's
>SOME difference, and then creativity and imagination take over.

I agree that people assume there's some difference (as the examples
show), but I'm not convinced that this has any impact on your
lexicon--i.e., I doubt many people really have two homophonic lexical
entries for 'grey' and 'gray'.  When they're faced with the problem
of spelling (or of telling us why there are two spellings), they do
some metalinguistic reasoning and come up with a way to go.  But I
really doubt that when people are uttering the sound /gre:/ that they
are using one or the other meaning that's been claimed here.  Yes,
there are different colo(u)rs that /gre:/ refers to, but that doesn't
mean that the word has different senses, just different applications.
I can't imagine people would have an argument "is that 'grey' or is
it 'gray'?"  (If they did mean different things, then I would imagine
that they would evolve to be pronounced differently, since it's
pretty uneconomical to have confusable homophones.)

In the case of theatre/theater, one might argue that there are
different senses at work, and so there are two items, but I don't
think the usage is really clear-cut across senses.  For instance, I'd
probably write 'amateur theater', but 'London theatre scene'.

So, what I'm saying (like Ron, I think--and perhaps Larry) is that
the spellings give different connotations when you see the words (or
have to put them) in writing, but that the spellings do not represent
clear-cut denotative differences.  (Now, we can argue about whether
denotative differences can be clear-cut, but that's another
matter--and contrary to the claims that people were making about
gr{e/a}y.)

As for me, living in England I'm starting to associate 'grey' with
the weather...

Lynne




--
M. Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 3AN    UK
phone:  +44(0)1273-678844
fax:    +44(0)1273-671320