‘I don’t know
what you mean by “glory,” ’ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled
contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice
knock-down argument for you!”'
‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down
argument,” ’ Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in
rather a scornful tone, ‘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.’
‘
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 anything with, but not verbs – however, I can manage the whole lot of
them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’
‘Would you tell me, please,’ said
Alice ‘what that means?’
‘Now you talk like a reasonable child,’ said Humpty
Dumpty, looking very much pleased. ‘I meant by “impenetrability” that we’ve had
enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you
mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your
life.’
‘That’s a great deal to make one word mean,’ Alice said in a
thoughtful tone.
‘When I make a word do a lot of work like that,’ said
Humpty Dumpty, ‘I always pay it extra.’
‘Oh!’ said Alice. She was too much
puzzled to make any other remark.
‘Ah, you should see ’em come round me of a
Saturday night,’ Humpty Dumpty went on, wagging his head gravely from side to
side, ‘for to get their wages, you know.’
(Alice didn’t venture to ask what
he paid them with; and so you see I can’t tell you.)
The first two
exchanges could be taken as a comment on Oracle's trial by bushwhacking tactics.
The last bit including the part in parenthesis could be taken as a dig about
Oracle grants to Stanford. Adjectives as regular employees (engineers), verbs as
professors consultants. The impenetrability demonstrating
The following bit on explaining the poem Jabberwocky is
probably very applicable too, as a tug on the beard of patent claim language.
That a lawyer might find so much in one passage of 'Through the Looking Glass'
to communicate about the present case tells you how important wordsmith work is
to the legal profession. I'd imagine the person selecting the reference finds
similarities with a lot of his court cases in the writings of Lewis
Carroll.
The question also is, were these subliminal messages and were they
received by the intended recipients?
