In 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs' Donald Davidson attacks a picture of languagewhich, he says, is prevalent among philosophers and linguists. Davidson's criticism,even if correct, is not radical enough. The common irregularities of everydaylanguage, such as malapropisms, nicknames, and slips of the tongue, not only implythat linguistic meanings are not governed by conventions that are learned in advanceof occasions of interpretation, but undermine the very idea that linguistic meaningcan be accounted for in terms of systematic meaning-theories. Davidson continues tohold that Tarskian truth-definitions should play a central role in philosophicalaccounts of language, but if the goal is to describe rather than to improve orotherwise change language, we must give up the aspiration towards theoreticalsystematicity altogether. In this connection, Davidson's approach is compared withthose of Quine and Wittgenstein. It is argued that Davidson's unwillingness to giveup the notion that meaning is systematic is best explained in terms of his vacillatingbetween treating meaning-theories as mere representations of the linguistic abilitiesof a speaker and seeing them as playing a more substantial role in communication.