I realize that you are trying to bail yourself out of an untenable position (and to your credit you are using humor to help) but two unavoidable truths are (1) words do not have universal meanings and (2) words and expressions evolve and that is a quintessential attribute of language.
"Don't make a fortress out of a dictionary." (Learned Hand)
Let's talk about the response to thank you for a minute. First of all, what you would likely call the accepted formulation (you're welcome) makes no sense in the context of the dictionary definition of welcome. Secondly, the growth of no worries, no problem, etc, in American English likely derives from the fact that we have a very significant percentage of Spanish speakers who say de nada (literally, of nothing). The encroachment of other languages feeds the evolution of language. We have many English words that were never English until we experienced waves of arrivals who spoke Dutch, Yiddish, Italian, Spanish, and so on.
The moral of this story is that when you are resistant to the evolution of language, you are resistant to the evolution of culture. I won't hold my breath, but I do hope you come to realize this. |
