R: I'm glad you asked me that because I can tell you. It happened exactly at eleven o'clock at night on November the eleventh, 1918, Armistice Day. Violence burst out in my Cambridge, the other Cambridge, medical students on the rampage. I renewed contact with C. K. Ogden late that night because he had suffered from damage anud I was a witness and could help him. We stopped at eleven o'clock half way down my little twisting stairs (I rented a couple of rooms from him in a decrepit old house next to the Cavendish Laboratory), somehow we stopped there and started talking about meaning.

There had been an article in Mind and another play-up in, I think, the Aristotelian Society Proceedings; people had been talking about meaning and making an awful mess of it, and we'd been reading them by accident--neither of us knew the other was interested at all--and we started making comments on them. We stood there two hours on the stairway 'till one o'clock. I can remember a bats-wing gas-burner above my head. This was out of kilter and every little while it squealed and I would reach up and try to adjust the tap of the burner. We went on and on, and the whole of our book, The Meaning of Meaning, was talked out clearly in two hours.

One of the chapters was on the theory of definition; we found we could agree. It's a most extraordinary experience, finding you can agree with someone. Decades later it wasn't the case that we could understand one another at all. That is a useful thing to think of, that a first intellectual encounter can result in almost complete malcomprehension on both sides and at every point.

Anyway that was the start of The Meaning of Meaning, and its definition chapter was to lead Ogden into inventing and working out Basic English. It is a curiously pin-pointed starting-point, a two hour conversation on definitions interrupted by a bats-wing gas-burner.

I: Were you then a tutor in Cambridge?

R: No, I was only doing what a lot of people do at universities, hanging about, hoping for a job. And I was suffering from what Ogden used to call "hand-to-mouth disease." For a nominal sum, he had rented me an attic and it was on the way down from this attic that we suddenly got together and went on having the most enormous fun, I believe, two people have ever had--writing The Meaning of Meaning. It doesn't perhaps look as though it was such fun, but it was much of it written in the spirit of "Here's a nice half-brick, whom shall we throw it at?"

I: Do you find you intellectual origins back in the philosophical radical tradition of the nineteenth century? Out of Mill's critique of Bentham and his study of Coleridge?

R: Well-well, yes, but most eclecticly. I turned by accident to philosophy because I couldn't bear history. Then, what I read in philosophy was a matter of chance. In those days at Cambridge, you had no assigned reading. You had no apparent awareness--quite contrary to the fact--no apparent awareness in lectures that others had ever thought about these matters before. Whitehead, Russell, Moore, MacTaggart and the rest were all prophets, as it were, of various kinds. They would occasionally make a reference to someone--but it was in order to controvert. . . .

I: Did you begin your studies in Coleridge then?

R: Not until years later, not until I had published at least The Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism. If anyone looked carefully, they could see I didn't--then--know anything about Coleridge. I wrote about him here and there, but I obviously didn't know him. But after that I really did get down to that, largely from having to give a course on Coleridge. Lots of things happen to people from having to give a course.

I: Where did you teach Coleridge?

R: Oh, Cambridge. I accidentally began to teach at Cambridge early. In fact I taught the next year, and I was giving a course on "The Principles of Literary Criticism" and another course on "The Contemporary Novel" to make at little money. Between the two I could survive. In those days and "on approval" in my status could collect fifteen shillings a course from any who came three times. It is not so now.

I: About what time was this?

R: Began about the eighth of October, 1919. That year was quite beyond anything you could imagine. It was World War I survivors come back to college. Not a bit like the end of World War II. There was an atmosphere, such a dream, such a hope. They were just too good to be true; it was a joy to deal with those people; those who got back to Cambridge from all that slaughter were back for reasons. . . .

I: How did you develop your famous distinction between referential and emotive language?