Grice thought that we should be guided by maxims. To poke fun on Kant, he
called this alleged 'HAND-book' of maxims the "Immanuel".
There is a some reminiscence of L. J. Helm's commentary on 'self-handedly'
with this note from Quinion's World Wide Words:
"A contributor to another language mailing list mentioned an announcement
from Subaru about the failure of a device designed to stop the car if a
frontal collision was imminent. In the light of this defect, Subaru wrote, the
driver will now have to “manually apply the brake pedal”. Did this mean,
the contributor asked, that manually can now also mean performed by the
foot?"
Quinion writes: "What was surely in the contributor’s mind was that manual
and manually ultimately derive from Latin manus, hand. But as almost always
there’s more to it than an argument from etymology.
As it happens, classical Latin seems not to have had a specific word for
doing something by hand. The direct ancestor of our manual is Latin manuā
lis, something held in the hand or of a size to fill the hand. The ideas of “
worked by hand” and “working with his hands” come into English a thousand
years ago via Anglo-Norman French, in which manuel meant doing something
with the hands but particularly physical labour rather than mental activity.
This distinction remains fundamental. As manual labour necessarily involved
the hands through wielding tools, this allowed the ancient link with the
source of the word to remain at the back of the mind. The development of
self-executing machinery in the past hundred years or so has led to a new
sense
for manually — we now contrast it with automatically. We meet this most
often as a choice between automatic or manual gearboxes in cars but from as
early as the late nineteenth century telephone exchanges could be automatic
or manual. These days, computers often do jobs without requiring human
intervention, so a sentence from What Personal Computer in 1991 makes sense: “
The computer-generated statement of accounts couldn’t be used, and had to be
recalculated manually.” Conflict between this new sense and the traditional
one does sometimes lead to odd phrasings. A 1942 issue of Diesel Power
magazine, found by American researcher Garson O’Toole, reported: “Auto-Lite
Two-Step Starting Motors are available in both manual (foot-pedal operated)
and automatic (push button operated) types.” The Oakland Tribute of
California noted in 1960 that “The surrey was originally operated manually by
pedals.”
However, such confusions are rare (otherwise I suspect pedally would be
much more often encountered) and because writers are thankfully well aware of
the underlying incongruity." -- http://www.worldwidewords.org © Michael
Quinion
Cheers,
Speranza
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