What is key for me in this perspective on BREXIT is that the new sense that has evolved from the initial exploitation has been nominal in the ways that we have shown here but that its nominality also encodes complex meanings of event-oriented meanings and of hypotheticality.
Debts are always nominal, in the sense that companies must pay back what they borrow.
Ah, but the word has a connotation that makes politicians shudder: it resonates as merely "nominal; in name only".
Also, somewhere the story should explain what we meant by "nominal" — in this case, it means without adjusting for inflation.
So someone or something does have to pay the sum - nominal in Europe, not so nominal in the developing world, which probably explains why many rivers, hills, beaches and waterfalls getting plenty of votes in Mongolia, Nepal, Eritrea and elsewhere remain officially unsupported.
"There may be some good that is accomplished even if the amount in question is all but nominal, in expressing some notion that as a society, we have collectively said this is a problem," he said.
