Yes I quite agree.

@Fernapple inflexibility in any perspective is generally a dubious thing. Might as well be a fundamentalist atheist. One of my favorite bumper stickers (used to have one) is "Militant Agnostic: I don't know, and you don't either!"

To your point about no absolute meaning in words, a thesaurus is a curious thing to me. Look up a word, see a handful of alternative terms. Then look up one of those alternatives. Usually(though not always) the list of synonyms for that word will be slightly different than the list for the first. That is because definitions are close but not identical or complete between synonyms. Connotation and nuance gets bulldozed by absolutists. Individual words often have several definitions and usages. You certainly learn that when trying to learn a foreign language.

Ah, spoken like a true religious believer. Your holy books are a perfect guide to everything in life, but you have to ask yourself if the worship of dictionaries, is in any way different from the worship of bibles.

No words do not have meaning, words only have usages. Words are human cultural constructs, used in an attempt to model reality, which we generally inherit and which were made by former generations who often had very different models of reality to ours.

To make good and worthwhile use of sceptical thinking, it is not enough merely to abandon literal belief in the sky fairy. Which is only a tiny part of the worlds culturally recieved folly, and probably far from being the worst or most dangerous part. It is needful to apply a sceptical view to all of human culture, including, art, tradition, litrature and yes language, plus any other of the numerous psuedo-gods that human culture creates and sets up.

It is usualy thought that, in about the fifth century BCE, the classical world first produced philosophy. Why ? Was not the recieved cultural knowledge of the classical world enough, did not Zeus and the oracle at Delphi have good enough answers ? Of course you know the answer. Which is that, it was obvious by then, that unregulated and inherited human culture was not a good source of knowledge and wisdom, it was needful at the very least to invent philosophy to bring the rules of logic found in mathematics to bare on the problems. And when once that did not prove alone to be enough, the enlightenment invented Natural Philosphy, now called science, to add extra measures and safeguards, such as the experimental method. None of that would have been needed had it not been plainly seen that recieved cultural information, was failing to give good answers or provide a good model of the world. And what was one of the first errors to be recognized, by philosophy, it was that of linguistic sophistry.

@Fernapple usage of a dictionary as a reference is not religious. Dictionary repeated revisions to reflect changing usage is commonly accepted. It is merely a reference tool, no holy text we claim to be somehow eternal truth. (Possible exceptions in the case of academie francaise; they take themselves far too seriously, lol)

@Fernapple I wonder what a "pseudo-god" is, given we don't believe in the reality of deity, and "pseudo-" means sham or false or spurious. That makes "god" and "pseudo-god" the same thing. Gotta love redundancy!

@MikeInBatonRouge If you use a dictionary for reference, then no it is not religious. But if you use it as a source of truth beyond the "usages" of words, which perhaps you would not do, but a lot of people do, then yes it does become a religion.

@MikeInBatonRouge An exact example proving my point. What word would you use for something which acts in the role of a god, but does not have many of the properties usually associated with a god, such as mind and thought ? I do not know one, maybe you do, my vocabulary is not vast, but the fact that common English does not provide such a term, and forces me to invent one. A bad one with redundancy, as you say. Is exactly the point that the failings of the inherited language, affects the way we model reality, in a detrimental way. Especially if we believe in absolute meanings.

And moreover lead to failings of thought, such as the common falacy,of believing that you can define god into existence, often found in the religious.

@Fernapple Idol? Demigod?

@MikeInBatonRouge Yep good ideas, but I still think that pseudo-god suits the purpose better.