I will do some specific replying, and I will do some general replying. First, the general, stemming from this one quote:
It's as if language for you is so much of a fixed structure that we constantly need people like Austruck around holding it together or else it will break apart like in the Tower of Babel. As if without a standardized language none of us will ever understand each other or communicate anything.
Okay, now, I'm going to go off on a little gimmick of sorts where I argue something it sounds like you may be arguing (or should be arguing, or will eventually argue). Sorry if that's confusing.
One thing that is obviously undeniable is that we have to have a rough agreement as to what words mean to have a conversation. I've been saying this from the beginning, and while you clearly have objections on a much larger scale, I don't see how this point is disputable. And since you haven't really disputed it, I'll assume you agree. If I say the word "house" and I mean "banana" (which I'm totally saying just because I'm in a house and have a banana on my desk right now, by the way), you will not understand me, and our conversation will be the poorer for it. This does not mean that house must always mean what it means now, or that we can't have slang, etc. But it does mean that we need this common ground to talk to each other. Good? Good.
Moving on. I can (and have) easily constructed examples about how it'd be pointless and stupid if we were just randomly making up what a word meant at any given moment. On the other hand, you can (and have) offered examples of how messing around with language can be interesting, fun, and any other number of delightful things. So we've established, I hope, that words need to have a degree of consistency, but not too much. We need some consistency to communicate, but too much stifles a kind of cultural osmosis and evolution that helps make life a little more vibrant and interesting. Great.
So, how does this happen? Well, you seem to be suggesting (I don't think you've made this argument explicitly yet, but you seem to be headed this way) that it should happen naturally. Which is interesting, because it's very, very subtly at odds with your arguments. In other words, it's one thing to say there should be no restrictions or regulation of language, and another to say that it should, ideally,
self-regulate, which would seem to follow from your position. I will assume, for the moment, that you believe this.
If you do, then Austruck simply becomes a part of that self-regulation. And so do you. And so does Michael Jackson. The balance is achieved both by Michael Jackson saying "bad" to mean "fearsome," and by me sitting in the Shoutbox and saying "that's not what irony means." That's how we, as a culture, regulate our language. Sometimes the usage is fun, obvious, interesting, and disseminates to the rest of the culture quickly. And sometimes people are just ignorant or sloppy about word use, and aren't really expressing much of anything, and they only add to confusion and poor writing if we all just go along and say that whatever they use a word for, that's what it can mean.
But more important than any of this, I think, is that these restrictions are not necessarily at odds with creativity. Structure does not kill art, it breathes an entirely new kind of life into it. Is poetry the lesser because we insist that it have a meter? Is literature hurt by simple forms of structure like periods, or capital letters? Does Jackson Pollock exist at all if he doesn't exist in a world alongside people who think paintings should look like things?
Art is pervasive. It is not more or less beautiful because of the restrictions it lives under: it weaves itself around them, like ivy. It incorporates all hurdles to become something new, something often more beautiful in oppressive places than open ones, whether that oppression is life-threatening and specific, or a trivial grammatical correction.
Similarly, the fun twisting of language you value is only possible with rules. Using a word in a new way ceases to be interesting, clever, or unique if there is no standard against which this new use trangresses. If everybody were playing free association all the time, it wouldn't be creative, it would be chaos. Limitation is a huge part of art, not only because of the ways in which it can resemble a more technical discipline, but because it can't break boundaries that aren't there. Or, to use a Chesterton quote that I think actually mostly means something else: "All art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame."