The products of Artefaction are not just made things but making things. Included in this class are tangible things with a capacity for rhetorical performance – for example a statue or a flag – as well as intangible things, of which the preeminent example is the word. Where words combine in sentences and in speech, they can attain monumental status and influence. Contemplating Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which Burke argued that a word like ‘freedom’ is only as good as the use to which it is put, Richard Dawson observes that for Burke, words are ‘evolving cultural artefacts that shape us and are shaped by us as we use them’. This serves as an excellent definition of the Making Sense informing the term ‘Artefaction’ as it is used in this chapter, as does James Boyd White’s idea (as summarized by Dawson) that language is ‘an evolving cultural artefact for making and remaking ourselves and our world – the real world’. In defence of ‘underwater basket weaving’, this chapter turns to material culture to consider the relationship between the weaving of words and such handcrafts as the weaving of baskets.

The word ‘making’ does too much work. This chapter teases apart the etymological senses of three words that are sometimes employed interchangeably as synonyms for making. They are ‘Invention’, ‘Creation’, and ‘Production’. To list them in this order is to list them in a sequence that is broadly, but not strictly, chronological. Invention indicates the initiation of the making process, Creation describes the development stage, and Production describes the presentation or publication of the created thing. This chapter argues for a return to those original etymological distinctions as a way of distilling different significations from our undifferentiated talk of ‘making’. Perhaps it is not a return that is called for, so much as a fresh acknowledgement of etymological distinctions that still survive just below the surface of our discourse. That survival explains why, for example, one can ‘produce’ a rabbit from a hat, but one cannot ‘invent’ a rabbit, or ‘create’ a rabbit from a hat.