but even my worst enemies here might have to admit that facility with English as she is spoken is not one of them.

On a point of perfect pedantry, Jack the Sailor, you seem entirely adrift when it comes to the pragmatic realities of linguistic mutability, which is what language is all about. It evolves around organic concepts rather than dictionary definitions, which (like grammatical theory itself) can only ever DEScribe such definitions, and never PREscribe them.

Like any other language, English as She is Spoken is mutable, vague, pragmatic, poetic, passionate, and ambiguous as fuck, syntactically and otherwise, and yet we're still talking to each other after 50,000 years. Correctness is anathema to Language, which evolves as it sees fit, and some terms (like Spirituality) will always be out there in the wilderness happy evading capture by those for whom words are absolute.