Reality admits shades between Humpty Dumpty being right‡ and the Prescriptivist utopia where some ivory tower decides how language works.
‡ In "Through the Looking Glass" Humpty Dumpty asserts that "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less".
So it matters whether it's, say, one pundit who thinks "Source code available to certain parties under license" (e.g. Microsoft Windows has been handled this way in the past) counts as Open Source, or so common that you can find dozens of erroneous examples in every major software publication of the last five years.
People writing "free reign" when they mean "free rein" might be unsalvageable at this point, whereas people saying "backslash" when they mean a forward slash - probably we can still say those people are just wrong and need to sort it out.
> despite a minority’s desire for it to be only used to describe a precise circumstance.
The vast majority of the software industry uses "open source" correctly. A small minority of people and companies with a vested interest in sowing confusion to promote their "source available" business models misuses the term and creates FUD.
This wasn't really my experience... I went to school for CS, which involved using a bunch of open and closed source tools of different kinds. I wasn't aware of the distinctions between different kinds of open source, some of which fell within the OSI definition and some of which did not, I just knew that closed source stuff where I couldn't read the source was more annoying when things went wrong. I remember the moment much later when I realized that there was this whole (weird, to me) turf war over the definition. It still seems to me that the most straightforward definition of "open source" is just any software for which the source code is available (such that it is open, like a book).
This confusion/imprecision is only common among non-technical people. When a software project describes themselves as open source, in the overwhelming majority of cases they actually mean this https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
The point is the adjective is commonly used imprecisely, despite a minority’s desire for it to be only used to describe a precise circumstance.
Genie, meet bottle.