Speaking of eggs (Proust's song-inducing writing), one of the best-known, funniest but also most unsettling laid in literature is Humpty Dumpty, in no small spoonful on account of his theory of language: ‘When I use a word,’ he says, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ He talks about how ‘to be master’ of words: ‘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!’ (163). It would be nice to interrupt and ask him about ‘veering’ – about whether it is an adjective or a verb, about how he would manage it and what he would pay when it ‘come[s] round me of a Saturday night … for to get [its] wages’ (164). Happily, Humpty's mastery is a delusion, merely eggomaniacal. One of the curious (or curiouser and curiouser) things about ‘veering’ is that it comports two quite distinct and even opposing senses: it can be a matter of exercising control or of loss of control. You might be veering in a controlled manner, even (so you suppose) masterfully, or you might be veering inadvertently, hopelessly, out of control. ‘Veering’ thus functions in the manner of what Sigmund Freud called primal words: it seems to entail antithetical meanings.