That's a good example. The author is committing the etymological fallacy here - there was nothing like Singapore (or the USA, for that matter) a mere few centu

That's a good example. The author is committing the etymological fallacy here - there was nothing like Singapore (or the USA, for that matter) a mere few centuries ago, so while the history of the word may inform us, it is not sufficient alone to capture the meaning of nation. Either nation is polysemous - a word having multiple similar distinct meanings - or its semantics has fuzzy boundaries. To answer questions like these, we are able to turn to corpus linguistic methods nowadays, whereas we used to have to rely on the intuition of native speakers. I don't think the author's narrow definition of nation would survive either of those tests. I think it's great to read about conceptual distinctions such as the ones the author brings up, regardless of whether those concepts are lexically distinct, so I enjoyed the blog post anyway.