> I'm an English language speaker (and writer) and you seem to be discounting my right to define language.

Fair enough -- you have a vote; but when you "vote" for something from a minority usage point of view, you should make it clear that you are advocating for minority usage, and why. What you did instead was to assert that the "right" way to use the word was X, when in fact the initial usage was Y, and most people still use it as Y.

I don't object to people thinking carefully about how a language should work and then advocating for it; that's what I do myself. Nor do I object to correcting common "minority" usages that I think are going in the wrong direction. But a lot of people advocate changes which are more "pure" but are clunky and unhelpful.

For example:

* Using 'they' as a singular of unknown gender; i.e., "I have an appointment with Dr. Smith; when will they be free?" English has need for such a usage; 'they' is simple and understandable; and it's been in use since the 1400s. I'm a fan.

* Using "literally" as a meaningless intensifier; i,e., "My head literally exploded." I strongly object to this usage, and I will continue to object to it as long as it's practical to do so, even if I become a minority. The reason is that we already have hundreds of intensifiers, but we don't have very many ways to say, "I am not exaggerating or speaking metaphorically, this actually happened."

* Switching from "negative agreement" to "double negative == positive". In French, to say you've never done something, you say "Je n'ai jamais faire rien", which literally translated would be "I not have never done nothing". But it's not called a "triple negative", it's called "agreement": if any part of the sentence is negative, the whole sentence has to have negative forms. If you go back to Henry VIII's time, that was the officially correct way to say things in English too. but at some point, some people came in and said, "Well, if we make all negatives contradict the other negative, we can say things like 'It's not nothing.'" Then educated people got rid of agreement, and started telling less educated people, who were speaking the same way English had been spoken for hundreds of years, that they were speaking English "wrong". I think the new way is better, but I think it was kind of a jerk move to change it.

> I'm not advocating initialism - it's not a word I recall ever using. But I'm not sure it's reasonable to claim that it's silly to invent new words to describe new things. I'd advocate abbreviation for an abbreviation you can't pronounce as a word, and acronym for an abbreviation you can.

I didn't say it's silly to invent new words to describe new things. I'm saying that for most people, NASA and FBI are not different things. FBI is a word pronounced "effbiyaye". If people really thought of FBI and NASA as different things, then it would be easier to give them different words.

On the other hand, when people hear "abbreviation", they think more like "st" for street (or saint), "dr" for doctor, and so on. FBI is more like NASA than "st" or "dr". So it makes sense to call FBI and NASA by the same word.

If you personally think that making that distinction is useful, then by all means do so in your own writing. And if you think it's important for people in general to make that distinction, then go ahead and advocate for it. I'll continue to advocate against it, and people on the whole will decide. :-)