Good post. The various wordy posts over the last month and a half will make a very nice chapter indeed. HOWEVER!

I take issue with #32, as I did in the original post. Perhaps I am the sort of guy who has a Jones for green-eyed, black-haired girls. Now [green-eyes] and [black-hair] may have exactly zero correlation with one another - having one makes you no more or less likely to have the other. However, for ease of reference (which is surely what it's all about anyway) I talk about green-eyed, black-haired girls as 'Wigginettes'. Now as long as I'm careful not to sneak in any connotations or start pigeonholing, how is 'Wigginettes' wrong?

Being my own Devil's Advocate for a sec - I understand how a word that doesn't correspond to a pattern in Thingspace doesn't describe anything coherent in Reality-Land. And that's fine. Outside my head, and the heads of people I talk to, sure, Wigginettes is a Wrong Word.

However, as Eliezer points out, we tailor our use of language to what is useful, what helps us get by. Pigheaded obstinacy and nitpicking are bad for communication, not good. People have utility functions, and language should be a tool for moving us in the right directions. Wigginettes does that for me, regardless of whether or not it describes a cluster.