Wrong Word Damn It
Has anybody else been noticing a recent trend to redefine already-known, well-understood words to mean something completely different (usually on the fly and without any contextual clues suggesting an altered meaning)? I don't know whether it is just coincidence that I've encountered it several times recently or whether it is a general rise of poor use of vocabulary.
I'm not talking about things like "all intensive purposes" for "all intents and purposes". I mean things like... well, one example was when somebody claimed something would happen most of the time, and when I pointed out that, while this would happen, the probability was far less than 50%, I got the response that he didn't believe I really thought he meant "over 50%". Then he got further offended when I pointed out that this is what the word "most" means. Basically, he tried to use "most" to mean "sometimes" and expected everyone to just know that. But I'm not ranting about just this one incident. I seem to be finding myself saying, "That's not what the word means" every few days at the moment.
I don't get it. Why would anyone consider this to be effective communication?