> "Especially" is dictionary-speak used by lexicographers in order to cover their arses I can assure you from extensive experience that you are quite wrong about this. "Especially" is used when the narrower nuance appears more frequently in the dictionary's corpus than the broader (and often earlier) one. It is a descriptive and not a prescriptive label. (It does not say, as one might erroneously believe, that "religionist" "properly" means "a religious zealot," only that it does so by a significant margin. Both nuances are equally "correct.") M-W maintains a continually updated corpus of millions and millions of examples of actual usage. So does Oxford. The cited M-W definition of "religionist" should be clear and unambiguous to anyone other than Derrida who knows what "especially" means. When meticulously edited dictionaries like M-W and OED dictionaries make mistakes, it's almost always in the case of a rare or obsolete word or phrase for which little printed evidence exists. "Religionist" isn't one of those words. Of course, it's always possible to insist that the dictionary is "wrong" if it contradicts one's own perceptions. As did Humpty Dumpty.
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