Semiotic

Applying a meme beyond its semiotic used-by date is undesirable, lowering status.

Especially when applying [the Lemon test] as a bar examiner might expect would have yielded glaringly ahistorical or politically inconvenient results, [the Supreme Court] regularly found reasons – longstanding historical practice, for example, or semiotic speculations about the social meanings of government actions to hypothetical “reasonable observers” – not to.