"To call a man happy is not to characterize or describe his condition; macarizing a man" (that is, calling him happy: the words "macarize" and "macarism" are in the O.E.D.) "is a special nondescriptive use of language. If we consider such typical examples of macarism as the Beatitudes, or again such proverbial expression as 'happy is the bride that the sun shines on; happy are the dead that the rain rains on,' we can surely see that these sentences are not used to convey propositions. How disconcerting and inappropriate was the reply. 'Yes, that's true,' that a freind of mine got who cited 'happy are the dead that the rain rains on' at a funeral on a rainy day! The great error of the Utilitarians was to suppose that 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' was a descriptive characterization of a state of affairs that one could aim at; but in fact the term 'happiness' is not a descriptive term: to speak of people's happiness is to macarize them, not to describe their state. Of course 'happy' has a secondary descriptive force; in a society where the rich were generally macarized, 'happy' would come to connote wealth; and then someone whose own standards of macarism were different from those current in his society might use 'happy,' in scare-quotes so to say, to mean 'what most people count happy, that is rich'...."

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