 In this context, can we safely assume that the concept of default meaning will sail with the most successful approaches to human communication, or is it in need of precisification now, when it is so diversely used (and sometimes misused)? Conceptual engineering is often a risky business. But going along with the common-sense use is not so: meanings that ‘spring to mind’ are default meanings – it is just that for some purposes we want to talk about meanings and associations that spring to mind in the context of a particular discourse, and for others, in the language system alone. This degree of flexibility, further justified by diverse objectives in employing the concept – as diverse as, say, making an interlocutor accountable for a strongly conveyed but ’unsaid’ insult on the one hand, and devising algorithms for training machines to use language to communicate on the other, is probably not so difficult for theorists of meaning to live with.