When I was a child there was a collection of nursery rhymes that sat on a bookshelf, and on the cover of this book was a picture of a wise looking egg creature with spectacles. There was one rhyme in this book related to this egg creature, and his name was Humpty Dumpty.
There is a surprising history and evolution to the story of Humpty. In my research I have found numerous English literature scholars who have spent some time evaluating the origins of this character and of course making the attempt to assign some political or cultural meaning to the representation and portrayal of the large egg that cannot keep his balance. Most likely this is just a silly rhyme that was nonsensical at the start and there never really was any meaning, however, it is fun to ponder what this might mean.
It must mean something, because the character of Humpty Dumpty makes his return every so often in animations, cartoons, some films, several hip hop songs, and of course in advertisements. In case you do not remember it, here is the rhyme:
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.
This rhyme has appeared in this same format since the early 19th century, becoming a mainstay in children’s nursery collections. Earlier versions make no mention of horses, but rather, scores of men. Some have a darker twist, such as, “Humpty Dumpty lay in a beck, with all his sinews around his neck.” Regardless, the core form of this rhyme has been the same for several hundred years.
A while ago a story started circulating that there was a military cannon in Colchester in 1648 that was lovingly named Humpty Dumpty. It was mounted on a wall, and during an incident the wall was destroyed, causing the cannon to fall to the ground and break. The theory is that the rhyme was based on this incident of the military trying to reassemble this cannon, and hence the lyrics of the rhyme. Many people have contested the historical accuracy of this account, so I will simply note that this would not be the first time a comical event has been memorialized in a nursery rhyme.
Prior to all of this it was common to refer to clumsy people with this name, and no one really knows where this came from. Lewis Carroll included a character similar to Humpty Dumpty in his book Through the Looking Glass. In this book, this wise egg shaped creature has a conversation with Alice about logic and meaning. This is what caused me to think about this today. In considering how to craft software to think more logically, you are looking to identify and label meaning behind phrases, keywords, or snippets of data. If you cannot label something with meaning, it is really hard to apply any logic at all.
This is the particular passage that I find interesting. Alice is having a conversation with Humpty Dumpty about the meaning of words. This is a comical exchange, with some interesting observations about the nature of certain words, such as that of verbs. As I am working on an artificial intelligence software, this particular exchange is interesting on many levels. In one instance, Humpty begins to try to recite poetry:
“As to poetry, you know,” said Humpty Dumpty, stretching out one of his great hands, “I can repeat poetry as well as other folk, if it comes to that—” “Oh, it needn’t come to that!” Alice hastily said, hoping to keep him from beginning. “The piece I’m going to repeat,” he went on without noticing her remark, “was written entirely for your amusement.”
And then later Humpty continues:
“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.”
When Humpty tells Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less,” he is claiming sovereignty over semantics. It is comic bravado, but it names a real tension: who gets to fix meaning, the speaker, the listener, a community, or an authority with a style guide and an API?
The rhyme itself is a case study in meaning that will not stay still. “Humpty Dumpty” begins as slang, a clumsy person, is later told as a riddle whose answer is an egg, becomes a nursery stanza, and only after Carroll gets involved does the egg become canonical. In other words, the same words keep doing different work because audiences, media, and power centers change. The rhyme’s history is a time lapse of semantics in motion.
Humpty’s arrogance mirrors modern platforms that choose what a word means in a schema or model: we pick a label set, define intents, curb ambiguity, and ship. That choice can be useful; standardization lets words do work at scale; but it is never neutral. Like Carroll’s egg, we are tempted to believe authority can stabilize meaning indefinitely. Yet the rhyme’s etymology reminds us that usage keeps moving the target. Meanings are not only defined; they are negotiated.
If our era is about codifying and monetizing language, then putting Humpty back together should not mean forcing every utterance into a brittle mold. It should mean responsible reconstruction, rebuilding utility without pretending we have restored the original living context. Practically, that calls for a different posture and different design moves.
Instead of asking, “Did we restore the same Humpty,” we might ask, “Did we rebuild enough integrity for these words to do honest work now.” Honest work means decisions traceable to evidence; stakeholders able to challenge definitions; systems that admit uncertainty without collapsing.
In that light, the king’s failure is not inevitable, only a warning. If we acknowledge that meaning is partly engineered and partly lived, we stop pretending to make shattered eggs whole and start crafting reliable vessels for new use. The rhyme’s long, wandering etymology is permission to build with humility; whatever we ship today may be tomorrow’s folklore. Our job is to let words earn their keep without breaking the world they name.
