Hmmm...no reply. Joe is probably poring over his grammar/ethics/manners rerferences to see if I have a point! 
I was actually putting the finishing touches to this week's edition of the Forum.
Anyway, Max, I think the whole thing boils down to a matter of point of view. If I were a storyteller, for instance, it would be perfectly all right to write “Sometime ago, my dog Butch brought home a big, fat quail” even if, in fact, I had a dozen dogs in my kennel—so long as my having those other 11 dogs has no bearing on the story I am about to tell. I don’t have to bother my readers with the fact that I have those 11 other dogs, much less enumerate the names of my dogs as Buck, Spot, Bantay, Brownie, etcetera. Only my dog Butch—with no commas hemming him in—matters to the story both to me and to my readers.
As always, language is largely contextual. We don’t have to qualify our every written word or utterance for all audiences—much less for the whole world. It’s enough that our main target audiences understand us perfectly with minimum qualification of our statements. To overqualify our statements at every turn could, in fact, be an exercise in superfluity and be counterproductive to the communication effort. Of course, when someone is not in the know about the context or the culture whereof we speak, and if that someone asks us to clarify this or that detail, that’s the only time when we ought to supply the clarifying details.
