And while I'm at it

As we suggested in a previous post, today is a day for settling scores as I establish primacy in the linguistic blogosphere. Sort of like the last ten minutes of The Godfather, but without the bloody mess. I wouldn't bother to take notice of the poseur known as Languagehat, but concerned graduate students have repeatedly expressed worries that he is retarding the progress of objective science by denying the obvious truth that all languages are underlyingly identical -- by a deep and unavoidable principle -- to the northeastern American English dialect that I happen to speak.

Now, by his own admission, Languagehat is in fact an ape, so it really would be a waste of space to refute him. Aside from that, he spends a lot of time engaged in polemics about what I think, which he wouldn't do if he didn't realize that, when all is Spelled Out, I'm right.