Jeet Heer has mastered the art of confidently using pretentious words he doesn't understand, knowing that most people will be too intimidated to challenge him and risk looking stupid. But some of us know what gestalt means, and that ain't it.
All the changes in linguistics in the last 25 years are not pertinent to the point about shifting usage that Pinker described in book, which are in fact still how this subject is understood.
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Jeet, go on Chao.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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Jeet, none of this excuses your tweet, nor does it deal w/ the fact that academically bound terms do not always undergo the same shifts as other words. Regardless, you've made it clear your understanding of linguistics--including language change--is quite shallow.
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Funny ... that shallowness across a range of subjects seems to be a common trait among a faction of the left.
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No, it's not. It isn't even consistent with how Chomsky, Pinker, and other semantic externalists understood changes in use 5 years after TLI was published: see Chomsky's New Horizons (2000).
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Of all the people bodying you here over your shallow understanding of linguistics, I might be the most sympathetic (because I'm cool with really weak conventions governing use), but you're making it hard by insisting 25-y/o-Pinker-on-dev-ling is definitive on semantics.
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