Sitting atop his ivory wall, the pedantic egghead Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that any word he uses means “just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Humpty Dumpty deflects: “The question is. . . .which is to be master – that’s all.” Humpty Dumpty means master in the sense of ruler, the one who holds power over the word. But “master” carries an older sense that he has discarded: the ancient term for teacher (magister), whose authority ought never to be power, but the conformity of his mind to reality.
In this scene with Humpty Dumpty, Lewis Carroll gives us a portrait of a certain kind of Oxford academic: pompous, contemptuous, and confident in his own authority. He subordinates the true source of speech, which is reality, to his will. Humpty Dumpty is the prototype for a veritable army of modern professors, convinced that in controlling the meaning of words, they control the world. Sit through an accreditation review, or a staff development day, and you’ll encounter Humpty’s prolific progeny. The radical abuse of speech is no isolated phenomenon; it is
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