Glad this is top comment atm, and thanks for saying it. Pop/folk linguistics is too easy and super annoying. This is a bad article and it misrepresents the not

Glad this is top comment atm, and thanks for saying it. Pop/folk linguistics is too easy and super annoying. This is a bad article and it misrepresents the notion of a 'universal' in any sense (Chomsky, Greenberg, you name it) but the most purely functional. Things like sentence/word length being bounded by memory or cognitive capacity or whatever aren't a 'universal' in any meaningful or useful sense, and no linguist would argue otherwise. Probably.