steepholm

I don't disagree with any of that, but "defective" certainly isn't being coined by the writer here. If anything, what I was trying to point to was the kind of accumulation of anomalies you get just prior to a paradigm shift, but expressed here in terms of anomalous terminology rather than data. The writer has inherited the discourse of "defective", and is using it even as he sketches out an alternative with which it is incompatible. What intrigues me is the lack of any apparent sense that it is incompatible.