A Follow-up to "What Do You Mean by 'Communication'?"

My dear father and Socratic teacher, Wayne Unks, was kind enough to probe thoroughly into the meaning of my previous post. I started replying in the comments, but...it really just got too long. His comments were:

"Must mutual understanding be achieved in order for an exchange of thoughts to be considered communication?"
and
"...if the recipient doesn't understand the sender's thoughts and, according to the above definition, communication did not happen, then what did take place? With respect to your analogy, a download still occurred - data got to the intended destination. It may not be useable (i.e. understood), but the download took place. The same can be true of sharing - I may share an object with you, you receive it (hear or read it in the case of a thought exchange), but don't make use of it (or understand it). That doesn't mean I didn't share with you."

My reply is as follows:

What Do You Mean by "Communication"?

So I've got this talk about communication, and how it's so important and the heart of human interaction and all this. But then I thought, well, a bloody lot of good these ideas do anyone if the reader and I aren't on the same page.  So here is my attempt to define this expansive term.

Literally

It's no mystery that the meanings of words evolve. They go in and out of popularity and propriety and, for being the primary method we have for describing our experiences, are by and large bloody unreliable. My  favorite example of this is the word "nice", although there are scores of examples of such words that used to mean one thing, and now are something very different. (But I will spare you my raving over these.)

And now I'm going to open my mouth (but not literally!) on that topic that has the most cursory linguaphile up-in-arms. It started (from what I can gather) with this article decrying the addition of the "figurative" definition of "literally" to the major dictionaries and Google.  Communicators, word-lovers, and Grammar Nazis alike have raged for many years against this egregious misuse by those less attentive than themselves, but this, it seems, was the last straw, and now the Internet is figuratively exploding with grammarian rants and counter-rants and great fervor over this small addition that would seem in line with general linguistic evolution.