Oh, yes it is pretentious, and the point of view is that some many such people think that they should do things according to their whims, rather than bothering to find out the real way. Furthermore, your idea of "mandate" is a silly slang one. Look at these from a good dictionary:

1.a command or authorization to act in a particular way on a public issue given by the electorate to its representative: The president had a clear mandate to end the war.
2. From the League of Nations, a commission given to a nation to administer the government and affairs of a former Turkish territory or German colony.

Following the defeats of Germany and Turkey during WW I, former possessions of theirs were taken over:
3. By Britain and France in Africa. (Yes, there were German possessions there such as in Cameroon and Tanganika.)
4. By Britain and France in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, etc.
5. By Japan in the Central Pacific Ocean.(Yes they were held by Germany from 1898 - about 1916, and by Spain before 1898.)
6. By Australia and Britain in the South Pacific (Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, etc.)

D.A.W.
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I will just leave it up to you to look up when "Webster's" ceased to be a registered trademark of the name of any publishing company whatever. This information can be found on the Internet. I just remember that it was a long, long time ago.

Any reference to a "Webster's dictionary" is very dubious because this does not tell you which company edited it, which one published it, etc.
D.A.W.

Repeating: There isn't any such thing as a "Webster's publication".
That is just a generic name, just like a "King James Bible".

On the other hand, there is such a thing as a "Doubleday" publication because that is the registered trademark of one company. The same goes for Random House, Harper Collins, etc.
"Merriam-Webster" could be a registered trademark of a company, too.
D.A.W.

"it does sound a bit strange."
NO, not so. It sounds and looks extremely strange.

Also, some of you deal in a little bit of the history of French or Middle English, but you are not going back nearly far enough. You need to go back 3,000 or 4,000 years into the very roots of the Indo-European languages and see how things were done then.
There were singular pronouns and there were plural pronouns, and no confusion between the two -- and also if you went back far enough, there were DUAL pronouns.
Yes, pronouns and verbs for individuals (animate and inanimate), pronouns and verbs for pairs, pronouns and verbs for groups larger than two.

For modern Indo-European langages, I think that all of them have disposed of dual.
A good modern language for you to think of is German, which has masculine, feminine, and neuter for singular items, but for more than one, everything is just "plural", and these use plural pronouns, plural verbs, and plural forms of the adjectives. Wow, this really simplified all of the declensions and conjugations for the plural, but then we have to struggle with everything for the singular ones. Also, predicate adjectives do not have any declensions, either.

Like it or not, several other companies publish Webster's dictionaries, too.

The word "Webster's" is just as generic as "aspirin" is.
D.A.W.

Listen up! "Webster's" or "Webster's Dictionary" is NOT a company in the United States. "Webster's" is not even a trademark here. "Webster's" lost all such status a long time ago, and any company can use it -- and a lot of different companies DO SO.

The word "Webster's" has lost all of its legal status in the U.S., just as "aspirin" has -- this is a generic, common noun here. This is in contrast with Canada and several other major countries where "Aspirin" is still a registered trademark.

"Bayer" is another confusing one. The U.S. Government confiscated the trademark "Bayer" from the German and Austrian companies during World War I. Bayer here became an American company. I will leave it up to you to puzzle out the details, but within the last 10 years or so, the Bayer company in the U.S. might have been bought up by one or more European companies. Anyway, it is quite confusing.

Also, because of all of the legal complications, the word "Cola" can be used by two different companies in the United States: Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola. Otherwise, such things are not allowed because the use "Cola" by both would be trademark infringement. It is just one of those weird things that has developed in the court cases, and at the root of it was a period of time when the companies did not vigorously defend their trademarks.
D.A.W.

In other kinds of situations, we would say that a diamond was cut seven times -- rather than saying that it was cut once and then recut six more times.

A piece of metal or semiconductor was refined five times to reach maximal purity, rather than being processed once and then refined four times. Such efforts for purity are vital for materials in elecrical work - especially for copper and silicon.

I have now "reminded you of that four times", rather than told you once and then reminded you of it three more times
D.A.W.

Yes, it is the idiomatic way of saying things in English.

We get the messsage, "Your comment is successfully posted. Thank you."
Well, then, why cannot I look at it RIGHT NOW, and I mean INSTANTANEOUSLY.
Why cannot we be told the truth, as in, "Your comment is in the process of being posted. You can look at it when we get around to it."
D.A.W.

Why is it that this Web site has such aggravating problems?
When I have visited a page of it, and then I want to go look at a different Web page, and then go back to a page that I have visited before, I WANT TO GO THERE INSTANTLY. After all, that page is supposed to be in the Temporary Internet Files of my PC already, and there is NO NEED to download that page all over again. None whatsoever: it is here already. There is no need for all of that hesitation.

For some Web pages, the owners are SO DAMN EAGER to bombard me with ads that they go into slow motion. However, this Web page does not seem to have many ads on it.
Also, if some some pages have had something new added to them, why not present me with what is new and leave the rest of it alone?

I have made this suggestion to other Web sites before, but the reaction was as if I were speaking Belorussian or Sanskrit. The people simply could not understand a word of what I was saying. The idea of doing things in an efficient manner simply did not compute.
As for my writing in Greek or Korean, I might have done better!
D.A.W.