When Samuel Johnson embarked on the daunting project of compiling an English dictionary in 1746, he aimed – as he later said – to “embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay”. By the time he called a halt several years later, he had been forced to acknowledge that this was an impossible task: language changes, words constantly shift, instability reigns. Or, as Humpty Dumpty informed Alice, a “word means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”.
In his looking-glass world, Humpty Dumpty neglected to comment on one particularly slippery term: science. Its
