‘Perspiration’ and ‘Sweat’

Abstract

There might be another way to differentiate the meanings and thus to account for divergences in use between such closely related words as ‘start’, ‘commence’, and ‘begin’. To see how this might be done, let’s consider one of Frege’s most frequently cited examples of Farbung, the pair ‘sweat’ and ‘perspiration’. It is often remarked, usually in jest, that a horse sweats, a man perspires, and a woman glows. Though neither Frege nor Dummett says which of the two terms bears the extra ingredient of meaning, both hold the difference between ‘sweat’ and ‘perspiration’ to be tonal. And though neither of them provides a general characterization of the supposedly semantic difference, I think it safe to say that what each has in mind is something along the lines of Dummett’s ‘style of discourse’, where conditions of politeness, or formality, are set beside those that make for informal speech.