> Cancer isn't societal (there are prehistoric skeletal remains with bone cancer).

The rarity of cancer in antiquity remains undisputed..

> Claiming otherwise is a rejection of the germ theory of disease, implicitly.

The author isn’t claiming otherwise.

Nothing on germ theory there. Just common sense. Make society healthy and we don’t need professional interventions to keep us operational.

> To the extent where he rejects the germ theory of disease?

I missed that. Where?

> If it is a universal truth, then there shouldn’t be any exceptions to the rule.

Have you give that much thought?

> But if everyone understands the word ‘horse’ to mean a certain animal, why waste so much of an argument asserting that ‘true’ horses are actually deer?

A horse is a concrete object; hardly a contentious matter. A better analogy would be the word ‘love’. Nothing wrong with pointing out that few people use the word in anything but a disastrously superficial sense — many of our admired thinkers have said as much.

I can’t see the problem with caveats, or with expanding or deepening the use a word and, thereby, giving us a new understanding of it.

> Then it makes the claim that authority would still exist, they just can't tell people what to do. Which in most uses of the word would mean that they aren't actually an authority...

The article makes the distinction between being an authority and being in authority. In the first case one is forced to obey, in the second one does so voluntarily.