Momentary Semantic Vertigo

Please forgive an extended excerpt from a favorite scene in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Humpty Dumpty is here the initial speaker, and he is discussing birthdays vs. un-birthdays:

“…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 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.

In the supermarket last night, I considered the flashlights displayed for sale. I’d been meaning to get a couple of little flashlights to distribute here and there in the house, for when we have power outages. (Not that we have a lot of them, but you never know.) I selected a couple of nice ones, each running on three triple-A batteries, and what I liked most about them was that their light came from this little cluster of bright LEDs instead of a conventional bulb. Five bucks each.

Took them home, and finally managed to cut through the insanely hard plastic bubble (invented, rumor has it, by the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Division of Impermeable Wall Materials and then released to the private sector for its own use).

Inserted the batteries, tested them. Great. All was in working order.

Dropped one flashlight here, another in another room, then returned to extract the cardboard packaging inserts from the plastic bubbles in order to toss the inserts into the recycling stack. Before discarding them, though, I thought Okay, you already know what you just bought but what the heck, flipped one over, started to read the fine print on the back.

Here’s what I saw first:

Sounds great, right? Then I read further:

What does the unqualified word never mean, Humpty, and the word guarantee?