"What seems to have happened is that the seminar room has taken on a life of its own; that topics are established and debated, regardless of any empirical reality. And that hypotheses evolve through a type of arms race; each one has to be more bizarre than the last to attract attention. The larger the constituency, and English literature is the largest of all, the more like an ants’ nest the competition. Only the weirdest survive. Similarly with linguistics; perhaps less than a twentieth of all linguists do anything that could really be described as empirical investigation and tiny fraction of that pays attention to little-known languages."