I was thinking about this while I was composing my post. I was thinking that I could cite literally every word with a “wiktionary.org” link, but there’s probably a bootstrapping problem where if you don’t already understand a reasonable amount about “wiktionary.org”, you can’t make use of my citations. Also, if the reader normally uses the “dictionary.com” definitions of words, and a definition conflicts with the “wiktionary.org” usage, that could cause problems.

Some states have an official group of people who determine what the “correct” way to speak is. I know that France has or had something like that. That could be useful for legal proceedings so that people who use language inconsistently don’t stay free much more often than people who do.

I think that we just have to assume that everyone who’s not in prison has some way to communicate with the majority of the people they meet, regardless of whether there is a group of people making prescriptive statements about definitions and/or grammar. That means that dictionaries (and any other detailed documentation like citations) don’t need to be used for day-to-day communication.

Note that dictionaries and things like that will probably always be useful for “technical” interactions, like using a legal court, or making engineering plans, or directing time-sensitive operations (like how a pilot should know that someone saying “mayday mayday mayday” means that an emergency is being declared).