Rules of usage

‹‹ Wittgenstein [ … ] carefully avoids identifying meaning with the rules of usage. If meaning and rules of usage were identical, the words “meaning” and “rules of usage” would have to be strictly synonymous , i.e. interchangeable in all contexts. This, however, is not the case. “He explained later that he did not mean that the meaning of a word was a list of rules; and he said that tough a word ‘carried its meaning with it’, it did not carry with it the grammatical rules applied to it. He said that the student who had asked him whether he meant that the meaning of a word was a list of rules would not have been tempted to ask the question but for the false idea (which he held to be a common one) that in the case of a substantive like “the meaning” you have to look for something at which you can point and say: ‘This is the meaning’ “. ( Moore, Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930-1933) ››