. . I had no trouble at all understanding what he said.

I don't depend on dictionaries to tell me what words mean, I interpret them in the context in which they are given.

To me, there has been no thread on this site as silly as the one about Kamala Harris' "misuse" of a word. If you know what the word meant in the context in which it appeared, it did its job. Referring to the dictionary is a last resort.

In any case, the dictionary has done our language a great disservice. English was right in the middle of a major transition in pronunciation - then the first dictionary was published, allowing English teachers to freeze it in that unstable state. That's why our spelling is so fucked.