As an avocational linguist I am sympathetic to all of that, but effective communication requires a large degree of mutual understanding of words, so it's not li

As an avocational linguist I am sympathetic to all of that, but effective communication requires a large degree of mutual understanding of words, so it's not like anything goes, either; plus most people have not studied linguistics and do believe in "correct language" (prescriptive) and do not hesitate to correct people who use "incorrect language" -- so it's a bit complicated culturally, if not from the stance of descriptive linguistics. In this particular case, there's no danger of misunderstanding, so I agree that this was just a nitpick about dictionary definitions versus a fairly common usage.