48 How to Win Every Argument
place and show that the ball would not have hit them in that
position.
A passage from Lewis Carroll sums it up:'There's glory for you!'
'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 / 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 UK's finance ministers are no less skilled. They have vast
numbers of Treasury officials whose sole purpose is to redefine
words like 'growth', 'investment', 'spending' and 'business
cycle'.
When you marshal your own arguments into a timely defini-
tional retreat, it is advisable to claim a meaning for the words
which is at least plausible. It should have some authority behind
the usage. One good way is to slip into a technical vocabulary
when you started out using ordinary speech.
Of course, I was using 'expectation' as statisticians do, multiplying the
probability of the returns by their size. I didn't mean it in the sense that
we expected anything to happen.
(Except, perhaps, for a fish wriggling artfully off a hook.)A useful device to provide covering fire for a definitional
retreat is the presumption that everyone understood your
*Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Class (London: Macmillan, 1927), pp. 124-5.