I listened to a fascinating podcast in the “Past, Present, Future” series by David Runciman on the 1726 satire “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift. Runciman gives an excellent summary of the various journeys that Gulliver undertakes in this book; journeys to far away lands were he encounters fantastic creatures and their world: tiny people, giants, talking horses, and the like. In one of these journeys Gulliver finds academics stubbornly determined to strip language of all ambiguity.