to signify that often, in poetry, two or more meanings of a word or phrase are relevant. 'Multiple meaning' and 'plurisignation' are alternate terms for same phenomenon ; they have advantage of avoiding implication, in ordinary use of 'ambiguity,' that quality a stylistic fault rather than a valuable poetic device. To an illustrative passage drawn from Shakespeare, Abrams added that its language is richly multiple in significance.' Twenty-five years later, Abrams's colleague Jonathan Culler writes of of meaning in usual sense, and describes it as the impossibility or unjustifiability of choosing one meaning over another.2 These two remarks indicate a shift in nomenclature as well as a deeper shift in assumptions and operations of literary theory. The surface shift, from New Critics' ambiguity to more recent indeterminacy, has probably not escaped attention of observers of critical vocabularies. The significance of this shift less obvious. Those whose training and affections lie in forties and fifties of American New Criticism might believe that shift one in name only: that ambiguity a good, old-fashioned, low-tech term for a certain quality of poetic and literary language, while indeterminacy merely a newfangled, high-tech term for same thing-imported from Europe and flaunting its semiotic riches like so-called Eurotrash in Manhattan, but ultimately less reliable and no more service-