 If generics do indeed give voice to cognitively fundamental, default generalizations, this would explain an otherwise puzzling fact: the absence of an articulated word “gen” in most or perhaps even all natural languages. That is, languages rarely if ever contain a dedicated, articulated operator that uniquely signals a generic statement, in the way that “all” signals a universal statement. Rather, languages overwhelmingly exploit less marked syntactic forms to express generic statements (Dahl 1985; Krifka et al. 1995; see also Carlson 2012). If generics express default generalizations, this pattern can be explained: in general, if a system has a default way of operating, then it is inefficient to explicitly instruct the system to operate in this way, since it will do so anyway, even in the absence of instruction. If processing a universal statement requires the cognitive system to deviate from its default way of generalizing, then explicit instruction is required—hence the word “all”. If generics require no such deviation, then languages need not contain a word “gen” (Leslie 2008).