stands. It may well be true that, for my exceedingly prim Aunt Matilda, the expression "he is a runt" means "he is an undersized person," and yet quite false that she has any degree of readiness to utter the expression in any circumstances whatsoever. What one seems to need is the idea of her being equipped to use the expression, and the analysis of this idea is also problematic.

So for the present I shall abandon the attempt to provide a defini-tion, and content myself with a few informal remarks. There seem to me to be three main types of case in which one may legitimately speak of an established procedure in respect of utterance-type X:

(1) That in which X is current for some group G; that is to say, to utter X in such-and-such circumstances is part of the practice of many members of G. In that case my Aunt Matilda (a member of G) may be said to have a procedure for X, even though she herself would rather be seen dead than utter X, for she knows that some other mem-bers of G do have a readiness to utter X in such-and-such circum-stances.

1. That in which X is current only for U; it is only U's practice to utter X in such-and-such circumstances. In this case U will have a readiness to utter X in such-and-such circumstances.
2. That in which X is not current at all, but the utterance of X in such-and-such circumstances is part of some system of communication which U has devised but which has never been put into operation (like the new highway code which I invent one day while lying in my bath). In that case U has a procedure for X in the attenuated sense that he has envisaged a possible system of practices which would involve a readiness to utter X in such-and-such circumstances.