This silly dialogue raises the question of how words work. If Humpty Dumpty were right, sustained communication would be impossible, or at best highly cumbersome. We intuitively sense that Alice is correct. One cannot arbitrarily assign a meaning to a word or load it with assorted ideas. Usage and Meaning But how does one determine the meaning of a word? The answer seems simple enough. The meaning of a word is established by usage among a community of speakers in a given time period. But this is