Yes I too find it funny that on a DIY web site we will have folks from different walks of life that knows more about electrical theory than someone who has paper hanging on the wall from different colleges, licenses, certificates, and is even hired by a college to instruct electrical theory.
That's impressive! Congrats on all your dedication and hard work. It takes real focus to achieve a career with that prestige.
I don't have all that paper.. I'm just a lowly engineer from Northern Michigan University Electrical Engineering program who spends most of his time designing specialized processing machinery for the automotive industry rather than any real engineering.
I also find it sad that these fine folks are too dense to learn.
short′ cir′cuit
n.
an abnormal condition of relatively low resistance between two points of differing potential in a circuit, resulting in a flow of excess current.
With a circuit of a 120 volt source, a 100 watt light bulb, and a switch, if the circuit is not shorted the light will never come on.
Now let’s take a moment and think a little. Let’s take a piece of wire and connect it to the two terminals of the light bulb. With the switch in the off (open) position does anything happen? Turn on (close) the switch and describe the circuit.
If you say the circuit is shorted then the closing of the switch is what caused the short plain and simple.
The dictionary definition you provided and the example you provided contradict each other. The key word is
ABNORMAL.
Throwing a switch is not an abnormal function.
In your example, the switch doesn't create the short, the abnormal wire connecting the two terminals of the light bulb is what created the short. Closing the switch just energized the already shorted circuit.
Just because a circuit is not currently energized does not mean its not yet shorted via an abnormal condition.
Also, as the dictionary definition you provided is mostly correct, consider the following:
If two different conductors from two different circuit breakers originating from the same phase leg come into contact with each other (lets say via a break in the insulation of both wires running next to each other), what condition would you call that? In such a situation, that condition may go unnoticed for a very long time until special circumstances occurred between the two circuits.