Word Play: War over words

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, October 21st. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Most of us remember the children’s rhyme about Humpty Dumpty who sat on a wall and had a great fall. What you may not know is how he influenced literature or how he informs our contemporary battle over language. Turns out Humpty Dumpty was quite the relativist. Here’s George Grant with Word Play for October.

GEORGE GRANT, COMMENTATOR: In his book, The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis declared, “Language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience. If you begin by flouting it, it has a way of avenging itself later on. We had better not follow Humpty Dumpty in making words mean whatever we please.”

Humpty Dumpty, of course, is a familiar character in an English nursery rhyme, probably composed as a satirical riddle or parody, as were most of our traditional children’s ditties, making it anything but an innocent nonsense fable: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall / Humpty Dumpty had a great fall / All the king's horses and all the king's men / Couldn't put Humpty together again.

There are several extant alternative endings to the ditty: Three-score men and three-score more / Couldn’t make Humpty as he was before. Or: Forty doctors and forty knights / Couldn't put Humpty to his rights.

Likewise, there are any number of theories about the riddle’s meaning. One theory imagines Humpty as the deposed king, Richard III, following his defeat at Bosworth Field in 1485. Another, conjectures that the rhyme portrays the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey in 1529. Yet another supposes that it depicts the 1643 siege of Gloucester during the English Civil War.

Regardless of its original intent, the powerful metaphor of Humpty’s great fall has found its way into literature as widely varied as James Joyce’s 1939 classic Finnegans Wake, Robert Penn Warren's 1946 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, All the King’s Men, and Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s Watergate expose, All the President's Men.

In Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll’s 1871 sequel to Alice in Wonderland, Humpty and Alice discuss epistemology, semantics, and etymology: ‘“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful voice, ‘it 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.’ ‘No. The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that's all.’ Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again, ‘They've a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do with whatever you wish, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’”

It was this part of Humpty’s literary legacy that C.S. Lewis was referring to when he warned, “We had better not follow Humpty Dumpty in making words mean whatever we please.”

At a time when the battle over dictionary definitions is as intense as the battle over Bible doctrines, who would have ever imagined that an old, familiar nursery rhyme might provide the most trenchant caveat to our current cultural zeitgeist? As the hymn writer caroled, “Tis ever old, yet ever new.”

I’m George Grant.

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