And I don't mean obsession about the concept, I mean about the word, and whether or not it's used 'correctly'. Words can have different meanings depending on context, and change their meaning over time. Always have, always will. Why get so extremely hung up about this particular one?

Claiming that the US 'is already Socialist' for the reasons you mentioned, I do agree, seems to stretch the definition of the term to a point where it becomes virtually meaningless. But using 'socialist' as a synonym of 'social-democratic', or as a reference to mainstream left-wing political parties whose policies do not in any way involve the state owning all means of production and distribution, such as those in Scandinavia, is a perfectly valid use of the word. For instance, until two years ago, the Scandinavian mainstream left-wing parties, as well as their counterparts in most other European countries, were longstanding members of the Socialist International organization - I'm not too sure what precisely happened in 2017 but there was kind of a mass exodus.

Just because the USSR and its allies found it convenient to keep the term 'socialist' in their official names, doesn't mean the rest of us should go along with that. There is a perfectly acceptable, generally understood and basically unambiguous term for their ideology: communism. Which you're welcome to rail against, and the vast majority of American self-proclaimed socialists won't have an issue with that.