That’s a really interesting reference. Bernstein and Halliday were basically pointing out that language is never just propositional, it’s always smuggling social structure with it. That’s exactly why drift matters: when an LLM compresses or rewrites, it isn’t just shifting words, it’s rebalancing those embedded cues of power, context, and purpose. Humans keep the “extra baggage” because it carries meaning beyond the literal. Models optimize it away. That gap between statistical surface and lived function is what I’ve been calling semantic drift.