The current Merriam Webster's is simply not useful nor is the New World Dictionary. If 3 people can be shown to have used a word a certain way on the street and another has written it in something that got published once then MW and NWD will baptize that word and/or usage. It still sounds ignorant, aggressively ignorant. It is like using "they" for third person singular.People who use such words with their new street validated meanings usually have problems discussing things that require that they and their interlocutors actually know what they are talking about. It becomes feelings and emotions because that doesn't require any precision.
This is your defense? To discredit the dictionary? To discredit ALL of them??? Wow! It seems odd that the publishers wouldn't contact an authority like you when they were compiling them, given your regal prerogative of invalidating their conclusions on a whim. It's lucky for Sam Johnson you weren't around when he was putting his Lexicon together. He'd have looked the fool without checking with YOU first!
You'd better drop a line to those gangstas at the Oxford English. A homedawg cain't hawdly unnastan DOSE homies.
It becomes feelings and emotions because that doesn't require any precision.
Interesting sentence. "It" -- being a singular pronoun -- hardly seems adequate to take a compound predicate nominative ("feelings and emotions"). And the subject of your independent clause ("THAT doesn't require any precision"), which serves to modify that compound plural, is also singular.
Your construction leaves some abiguity as to what exactly doesn't require any precision: emotions and feelings? or the act of "it" becoming "emotions and feelings"?
One might almost think that this sentence lacked grammatical precision.