 Captain Absolute manages to figure out the first meaning of Mrs Malaprop’s utterance, which is that if she understands (comprehends) anything it is the use of her own vernacular tongue and a nice arrangement of epithets. Davidson offers an intuitive description of what is going on in this case, a description that applies equally to regular communicative exchange. He then argues that this description of communicative exchange is incompatible with the claim that first meaning is systematic, shared, and prepared—and so conventional.