Yeah, it does smack somewhat of sophistry, maybe in a post-modernistic way, so I wanted to know if anyone could unravel any fallacies, omissions, or conflations in my reasoning. I mean, my exposure to semantics as a field is limited to a couple of old papers I happen to have read, so it could be that my cogitations have an insubstantial basis, in addition to being too many parts roughage than otherwise.

Horetore, my impression was that you were doing a degree like Theory and Criticism, something under the heading of Philosophy at any rate. Or am I off-base? What was your exposure to linguistics?

Disclosure: I'm at somewhere related to "clinical" linguistics at the moment. I'll get back to you all within the next few years if I can make it through to some sort of practice.

If not, there's always contracting I suppose...