The "definition" based on dictionaries obviously matters, but at some situations the words could have different meanings in different industries as well. So in crypto, "hodl" is a thing, "moon" means something else, "lambo" is different than just the car, there are stuff that do not mean anything similar as it used to. This is one of them, legal tender of "forcing" people to use, or not use, those are all very valid reasons.
Basically, as long as the other person you are talking to understands what you are saying, then I do not think that it means anything, it should not be a problem, we could very well do whatever we want. I hope that we could see something that changes eventually, but if people understand each other, life is fine.
This isn't the case in
politics. In fact, the very opposite is true in that context.
In fact, this is the way bad laws get put on the books that cause disasters and end up accomplishing the opposite of what people intended.
My guess is that politicians in El Salvador wanted to pump their Bitcoin holdings, and heard the term "legal tender" thrown around in casual discussion, not knowing what the term
actually means when you pass a
law making a trading instrument "legal tender".
Then lawyers needed to draft an actual law and thus had to understand the
real legal meaning of the term and they basically put a law on the books in that country that cost them a ton of money to implement and isn't actually followed by over half of the population because it makes no practical sense.
Indeed, this is the whole reason I started this thread :-).
I would rather people say, "I hope the government uses taxpayer dollars to promote my favorite investment instrument so it will go up in value!" rather than asking their elected reps for a legally loaded term like "legal tender".