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Humpty Dumpty and Verbal Meaning

1981; Oxford University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/430352

1540-6245

Michael Hancher,

Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies

Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty both relieves and worsens the difficulties that afflict language.1 He is glad to explain the words in hard texts like Jabberwocky; but he also can be deliberately obscure himself, as a matter of principle. This second trait seems the more striking. Humpty Dumpty's aggressive program of unconventional language use has long been a favorite aspect of the Alice books, at least among jurists and academics, who usually see in it a cautionary moral. In their discussion of the relative merits