I'm not sure that I like this traffic laws analogy. Sure, it explains why people don't always follow the rules. But it also implies that there is some set of prescriptive rules of language which people consciously break. But there were no prescriptive rules in biblical times, which people could get in trouble for breaking. There was just a set of conventions.
Perhaps a better analogy would be that people don't go to weddings and funerals in jeans or to the beach in a tux, although it is nowhere written down that you mustn't. At least, usually they don't. If you find someone breaking such rules, there may be a good reason, or it may just be that someone is being eccentric, or doesn't understand the conventions. So you are wasting your time trying to find explanations for every last case. And if you go back to insisting that such social rules are meaningful (or semantic) only if there are no exceptions, you have to conclude that there are no meaningful rules.
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