When you talked about 'decimate' at the beginning of TFA pt3, you strongly imply that you think linguistic descriptivism means the new meaning of 'decimate', I.e. 'to be greatly injured', is fine, because basically only linguists care about the underlying structure of words, word roots, etc. Language is as language does, and all that.

I think that worldview is consistent on its own... but I think there's an analogy to be made here, between the deep structure of a word versus the meaning of the word, and a character's underlying structural consistency versus their behavior.

I know it's a bit of a stretch, but it really seems to me that anyone who thinks Luke throwing the lightsaber away is a *writing error*, not merely an aesthetic preference, should also think that using 'decimate' to mean something other than 'destroying one tenth' is also a writing error.

Like, either things need to be internally coherent or they don't, right? The same argument that says that decimate means whatever people think it means, probably also says that Luke's Behavior makes sense if everybody thinks it makes sense. And frankly I suspect you will strongly disagree with the latter. What are your thoughts?