The main goal of this essay is to constructively deconstruct the age-old myth that “the world’s simplest grammars are creole grammars” and to demystify the methodological (mis) practices that underlie this myth and its corollaries throughout creole studies and beyond. I start with some notes on historiography and methodology, connecting certain trends in 20th-and 21st-century creolistics to outdated (quasi) Darwinian concepts in early 19th-century comparative-historical linguistics. Then I move to linguistics per se, inspecting the empirical and theoretical bases of creolists’ foundational assumptions about creole diachrony and synchrony. This will (re-) establish the epistemological limits of certain key terms in creole studies, including “pidgin (ization)”,“creole/creolization”,“young” vs.“old”,“simple (st)” vs.“(most) complex”, etc. I will argue that these terms, although per-