Humpty Dumpty

 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!

And (more interestingly?)

 "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone,
 "it means just what I choose it to mean, nothing less, and nothing more."
     -- ThroughTheLookingGlass by LewisCarroll

See LanguageAbuser for more on this.

While he's often drawn as an anthropomorphic egg, the original Humpty Dumpty was an oversized cannon that fell from its mount during the siege of Colchester (a Royalist stronghold) in the English Civil War. Apparently, it was so large that it could not be reinstated, even by "all the King's horses and all the King's men". Colchester fell to the Parliamentarians, and the nursery rhyme glorifies the siege (written, no doubt, by the children of the Parliamentarians...).

See http://www.famousquotes.me.uk/nursery_rhymes/humpty_dumpty.htm

This is an often-misused non-specific insult. If there is an official authority or documented consensus, then one needs to counter with that official citation or present the documented consensus reference rather than accuse people of purposely manipulating language in a guilty-until-proven innocent way. Please fine-tune your accusation BEFORE presenting it, otherwise you risk a FlameWar. KeepCriticismNarrow. --top

Personally, I prefer the egg version as it is rather surreal and conjures strange images in my head (to displace the strange images that are already there). -- PaulRuane

Does anyone know the origin of the egg? is it from the engravings for AlicesAdventuresInWonderland or is there an early humpty dumpty == egg source? -- JamesKeogh

This goes back at least to Mother Goose rhymes. An excellent reference is The Annotated Mother Goose. (And, indeed, see also MartinGardner's The Annotated Alice.)

The source can be Googled for. It was a huge cannon mounted on a wall in ancient England. It fell, taking down part of the wall, and royal troops could not raise it back to its mount. Note the actual nursery rhyme doesn't say "egg".

Google is a suspect source here because, of course, Google is based on the Commonwealth "Googy Egg", meaning about 4 minutes. The Annotated Mother Goose may be suspect on the same basis, but says the poem is actually thousands of years old, not English at all, and cites equivalents "Boule, Boule" in France, "Thille Lille" in Sweden, "Lille Trille" in Denmark, "Hillerin-Lillerin" in Finland, "Annenadadeli" in Switzerland, and many other names in Germany. This spread of cultures suggests strongly it's pagan and perhaps Sumerian in origin.

Anyway, the reason the rhyme doesn't say "egg" is that it is a classical riddle. TAMG gives another eggsample,

 In marble halls as white as milk,
 Lined with a skin as soft as silk,
 Within a fountain crystal-clear,
 A golden apple doth appear.
 No doors are there to this stronghold,
 Yet thieves break in and steal the gold.

The golden apple suggests also Eris's "Kallisti", the impetus of the Trojan war. And many an omelette attests to the propensities of chaos ...

In this biz, we often need working definitions. There is no official body of definitions and rather than get stuck in LaynesLaw loops, sometimes it is just easier to say, "Here is the definition I am using for this discussion." I see no problem with this. But some people who rely excessively on ArgumentFromAuthority sometimes complain when their pet authority is not used as the official definition. -- top

Example - people yacking that WebTwoPointOh is just marketect-speak and such. When I discuss "Web 2.0" with another engineer, they instantly know what I mean - a fragile website that uses pastel colors and requires only the latest mainstream browsers. No more verbiage needed to communicate rapidly. -- PhlIp

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