 This argument is highly doubtful. Just as the doings of the homosexual community in the 1970s, and the terminology that such doings introduced, don’t mean that the line “Now we don our gay apparel” has acquired a new meaning in the Christmas carol, a call to dressing in drag, so the doings of the oil industry in the twentieth century, and the terminology surrounding petrochemical products that such doings introduced, don’t mean that the line “He raised his plastic arm” has acquired a new meaning in the poem, a meaning having to do with the movement of a prosthetic limb. Newer meanings of a term, distant from original meanings and far removed in time, are utterly irrelevant to the meaning of a line written long ago. In effect, the principle of interpretation underlying Beardsley’s argument, that new meanings of a term are relevant to the interpretation of older texts in which it occurs,