This is a great point. Another good example is the "linguistic division of labor", put forth by Putnam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam) wherein it is proposed that language can function (i.e. words have meaning) because people assume there's a person (or people) that can fix the meaning of a certain term. An example: When it was announced in 2011 that researchers have found that the electron was (nearly) a perfect sphere, I had no idea what "perfect sphere" meant in this context, so I appealed to the experts on on PE (http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10433/what-does-i...).