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If you read a bit further (pages 2 and after) it's actually not all innuendo. In fact some of it is actually laudatory about his contributions. It's basically a

If you read a bit further (pages 2 and after) it's actually not all innuendo. In fact some of it is actually laudatory about his contributions. It's basically a very brief summary of Chomsky's ideas and the impact he had on linguistics as a profession. Namely using trees to model syntactical forms and his hypothesis on universal grammar. I don't know what it is about HN that makes people refuse to read past the first little thing they object to and then bloviate about it.

notacoward 10y ago
> I don't know what it is about HN that makes people refuse to read past the first little thing they object to and then bloviate about it. That's hardly unique to HN. Following Chomsky, I'd argue that it's actually a universal behavior, which merely finds (slight) variation in expression according to the medium at hand. It even has a Latin name - argumentum ad logicam - and it's closely related to cherry picking except that it's applied to parts of the argument instead of to data. In fact, I just did it to you when I picked on the inessential "about HN" part of your sentence (which reads fine without it), and if you find that annoying then perhaps you should consider that you also did it when you jumped into a response about innuendo without addressing the more substantive discussion that had already occurred.