For Oauth I'd like to borrow what I would describe humbly as a better analogy, and it comes from Douglas Crockford, and so adapting it from him commenting on Monads in Functional Programming, it goes something like this:
"OAuth is a simple idea, but with a curse: once you understand it, you lose the ability to explain it."
Chomsky never argued it was words (and how couldn't it be words, for there are millions of words from 100s of 1000s of languages), just a configuration to eventually learn those words.
At first I thought this was about how Netflix arranges movies for you to select, where each movie repeats down a horizontal line and you are forever scrolling right in cardinally equivalent but combinatorially different sets of movies. :D