And it ain't pretty.
You assume the premise, based mostly on ill-will and suspicion.
You ignore a lot of data.
And voila, you've just substantiated the premise, which was, after all the goal. And we all know that motivated reasoning is the sine qua non of critical thinking.
McWhorter did a better job, tied himself up in knots, and finally had to admit defeat when he finally said, outright, that the current usage of a wide set of native speakers must be classified as "archaic." Why? Because it was necessary for it to be archaic, even if it is current usage in a population that outnumbers the entire Af-Am community in the Northern Hemisphere.
The problem is that nobody wants to admit to speaking a dialect of English.
Not my white redneck kids with their y'alls and they-wuzes. Not my Af-Am kids with their "he angry". Not the middle-classers who speak close to mainstream English. They all speak the One True English. Everybody they know that speaks good English speaks like them. And they really don't get out of their little cliques.
And if you admit that you speak a dialect, they act like it's something to be ashamed of. The idjits.
So if there's a social variation in a group's denotation of a word, it can't be because of social variation that's simply perceived to the point of becoming dialectal. No, there can be Only One. So denials of uniformity must be affirmations of dog-whistle speech. And if most of the time a word means what they say it means, it's a clever conspiracy by 200 million people at our secret meetings. Not lexical specialization. Because to assert that something that's been happening for the last 5000 years (that we know of) in every community is still happening without explicit guidance is just silly talk.
It's like the Red Scare. We see what we need to see everywhere, regardless. If I out 10 other white racists will I be given a pass by the Un-American Activities Committee, or is that subject to inflation?
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