The term Language Models (LMs) as a time-specific collection of models of interest is constantly reinvented, with its referents updated much like the *Ship of Theseus* replaces its parts but remains the same ship in essence. In this paper, we investigate this *Ship of Language Models* problem, wherein scientific evolution takes the form of continuous, implicit retrofits of key *existing* terms. We seek to initiate a novel perspective of scientific progress, in addition to the more well-studied emergence of *new* terms. To this end, we construct the data infrastructure based on recent NLP publications. Then, we perform a series of text-based analyses toward a detailed, quantitative understanding of the use of Language Models as a term of art. Our work highlights how systems and theories influence each other in scientific discourse, and we call for attention to the transformation of this Ship that we all are contributing to.

Annotation quality is often framed as post-hoc cleanup of annotator-caused issues. This position paper discusses whether, how, and why this narrative limits the scope of improving annotation. We call to consider annotation as a procedural collaboration, outlining three points in this direction:(1) An issue can be either annotator- or researcher-oriented, where one party is accountable and the other party may lack ability to fix it; (2) yet, they can co-occur or have similar consequences, and thus any specific problem we encounter may be a combination;(3) therefore, we need a new language to capture the nuance and holistically describe the full procedure to resolve these issues.To that end, we propose to study how agency is manifested in annotation and picture how this perspective benefits the community more broadly.