As usual on contentious issues, I’m coming down somewhere in the middle. Personally, I consider poaching as “taking game (or fish) using illegal means”. Trespassing is an illegal means – you’re breaking the law in order to get where the deer are. Hunting out of season is an illegal means – you’re hunting when there’s less pressure and when you have no competition, which gives you an unfair advantage. Spotlighting is using an illegal means – you’re doing something illegal to give you an advantage. Sticking dynamite in a salt lick and pushing the plunger when a big buck is licking away is using an illegal means…you get the idea. To my mind, leaving your buck tag in the truck in a state where you’re supposed to tag the deer on the spot it expired is not poaching. It’s an oversight. It didn’t give you an unfair advantage in hunting the deer. Now on to the more philosophical aspects of the discussion.

To Sylvan’s (and others’) arguments: Dictionaries are useful in defining words. I’d say that is their reason for existing. I’d also say that most people would look at the dictionary as the final authority (anyone play scrabble or other word games?). And the first definition is considered the primary one in all of the dictionaries I’ve used. Changing the definition of words does sometimes have significant consequences. I am going to use a drastic example here that might get me in trouble, but I really mean no offense by it. The word “******” originally meant “slave”, without regard to race or skin color, in England, back when white people were slaves there and before there were any significant numbers of black slaves there. Then it meant a black person, and was not necessarily meant derogatorily. Then it became a derogatory term for black person. Now, its meaning and how it is taken depends on the skin color of who is speaking the word. Its original meaning is one of the primary (though not the only) reasons I find it such an offensive word.

To Reacher (and others’) arguments: Words do change (see above). I also think that Sylvan’s post with the various definitions that agree with what you said back up your argument.

All of that said, people mean what they mean when they say what they say. But communication is a two (or more) part transaction. The part of the speaker (or writer) and the part of the listener (or reader). It’s when the speaker/writer’s intention differs from the listener/reader’s interpretation that miscommunication occurs. One reason dictionaries are helpful.

My two cents.