As someone who is only half a linguist, but who work closely with established researchers, this odd variant of "language exotism" is far too common, even in 2017. For others, it's far too English-centric (dismissals from well-established researchers such as "but it's simple to express this information-dense, single word in language X just by saying (insert long, not very representative English translation of language X word here)... etc)
