A concept becomes addressable when a field can point to it without pretending to exhaust it. This apparently modest operation contains the full violence and utility of lexical infrastructure. Williams’s historical semantics shows why the problem begins before metadata: a word such as culture already contains incompatible temporal deposits, disciplinary migrations and social conflicts, so any stable label is a cut across semantic thickness rather than a transparent pointer to an essence. His method refuses the fantasy that terminological precision can simply remove semantic history; the difficulty of the word is itself evidence. Bal intensifies that instability by treating concepts as travellers whose analytical force emerges through movement between disciplinary situations, and Cassin radicalises it through translation, where the very terms most worth preserving are often those that resist clean equivalence. From this side, conceptual knowledge appears mobile, stratified and permanently vulnerable to simplification.