It’s easy to forget amidst a rising tide of synthetic text, but language is not actually about strings of words, and language scientists would do well not to chain themselves to models that presume so. For apt and timely commentary we turn to Bronislaw Malinowski who wrote: In follow-up work, Malinowski has critiqued the unexamined use of decontextualised strings of words as a proxy for Meaning: Malinowski did not write this on his substack,