I don't think the way you're approaching this is in keeping with HN guidelines. You seem to have jumped straight from "everyone agrees with my view" to "the pe

I don't think the way you're approaching this is in keeping with HN guidelines. You seem to have jumped straight from "everyone agrees with my view" to "the people who disagree with me are acting in bad faith", skipping the much more likely "other people hold views that differ from my own". As a native English speaker who lives in the US I don't need to check a search engine to understand the common meaning of the term. Sometimes people have different impressions of these things. About the only thing you could attempt to argue is that I'm in the extreme minority. I don't think you'd get very far with that though because it's unlikely that you have the evidence to back up such a claim. For all your apparent outrage the Oxford example that you cited is the closest you've come to presenting valid evidence in support of your position. However if you examine the paragraph just above your quote you will see that it is rather academic in nature. Having glanced at it I can't say that the description presented matches what I encounter in common usage by laymen. (I include myself in that category. I am by no means a political scientist or remotely well studied.) More generally, I think you've picked a fundamentally unwinnable position here. All it takes for me to be correct (and you to be demonstrably in the wrong) is for people in the area where I live to commonly use the terminology in the way I'm describing. And indeed they do, because I'm in a fairly far left part of the country. Now you can certainly object that the population at large where I live is misusing the term. But without a central governing body for the language that's going to be extremely difficult to argue. Either way it won't change common usage here. It's simply the difference between "commonly used in that manner" versus "commonly used in that manner, incorrectly".