Broadening the scope of words

Terry Jones' death from a cruel disease was expected, but sad nevertheless. After it had sunk in, and I had heard the tributes from writing partners Michael Palin and John Cleese, it occurred to me that a man with such wide-ranging interests must have featured on Desert Island Discs and Private Passions. Strangely, Michael Berkeley missed him, but Roy Plomley cast him away while the Python team was just still active. (The programme is available from the BBC archive, by the way.) 

Jones's choice of discs struck me as eclectic and I was just about to post a message on Facebook to that effect when I thought I had better check that the word was correct. The first dictionary which came to hand was a legacy Nuttall's from the 1890s, where the definition given for the adjective was: "Selecting; choosing out and adopting from the views of others what seems good" - rather narrower than what I had in mind, but clearly in line with modern usage. But the entry then defined the noun eclectic even more narrowly, as "a philosopher who selects from various systems such opinions and principles as he judges to be sound and rational; originally one who, having no system of his own, selected from Plato and Aristotle." 

One thing led to another. I believe I may have inveighed before against the use of "refute" instead of "rebut" or "deny". Sure enough, Nuttall gives only one definition: "to prove to be false or wrong". It still has only that meaning in the realms of chess and mathematics, but, thanks largely to politicians, it has become so weakened, that the secondary usage now turns up in today's dictionaries, e.g. Collins'.

And don't get me started on "absoutely" ...