As a Cultural Studies student, you think she might have been able to open her mind to this view. But persistantly she argued that language was merely a restriction that couldn't be surpassed. I tried various approaches to see if I could change her mind. These authors all rebelled against various things, where they had to work freely with language, as no priori descriptions lived. I changed my argument when this had no effect, to something of more interest to the computer users probably browsing this site, that is a fundamental of Computer Science.
Language is as functional as the person using it.
If functionality doesn't exist, it can be extended and defined, so the information can be effectively conveyed. Conventions of definition can be exploited to define what ever we want. As a programmer, I have made my own directions into parametric polymorphism, and creating runtime objects via DNS style strings. Using various conventions, I created in the language linguistic functionality that hadn't been there before. I provided methods that allowed me to create objects based on interfaces on the fly while allowing type safety.