[dmreedy]

It's absolutely untenable for the practical purposes you're after. Unfortunately, that doesn't disqualify it from being true. The more we examine language, the more it seems to be the case that there's really no guaranteed 'centers of mass', that they can shift between corpora, that they are different between times, geographies, social registers, and even between individual people. Some semantic units may be more volatile than others, but they're still all defined relative to each other within the head of a given speaker, and non-rigorously at that. And on top of that, they've got pretty complicated, non-rigorous connections to whatever the driving hardware underneath looks like.

It'd be nice to have some formal process for deciding what's bullshit and what's not. But, it doesn't seem to actually. exist in any objective sense. The words that make the most sense to you are your own. And everyone else always kinda seems like they're full of bullshit.