1.7 Humpty Dumpty
The egg who pays his words extra when he makes them mean too much
Introduction
Humpty Dumpty sits on a wall, balanced precariously, and lectures Alice on the proper management of language. When a word does a lot of work, he explains, he pays it extra — and when he uses a word, it means just what he chooses it to mean, neither more nor less. He is supremely confident, supremely fragile, and entirely unbothered by the nursery rhyme everyone in the audience already knows about how this ends.