Even more pedant. I don't have the text in front of me here (so I am only half-pedant...), but I recall that in that paper Samuelson first wrote "math is A language"; then he corrected himself (and the learned physicists who said it earlier, too) into "math is language", claiming that this was the best - actually, the only - way to put it. 
The latter is what I suggest to call the Samuelsonian disease!

I agree with John that many contemporary economists look more or less immune from it, but the backbone, the underlying structure of much of their empirical analysis (both in micro - RCT -and macro - DSGE) is, I guess, still largely "infected". And I suspect many of them are even unaware of that, because of their lack of methodological and historical training. 

Nicola
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