Using Saul Kripke’s well-known book Wittgenstein on rules and private language as a starting point, this article focuses on the way Stanley Cavell, in his second Carus lecture performed for the American Philosophical Association in 1988, undermines Kripke’s approach, offering a perspective that seems closer to the spirit of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The scope of such a comparison between Kripke and Cavell though is not philological but conceptual: to expose and overcome a certain picture of language. By concentrating on the ability to put words to new uses («word projection»), Cavell offers a radically different account of how we operate with words, conceiving language in more improvisatory terms, as always open and vulnerable to unexpected turns