I'm going to stay out of the astrological side of this argument, being as how I don't know jack about it, but I've got two cents' worth on the topic of word interpretation: saying "that's a flaw in the way our age has led us to interpret the word" is bogus. Language changes, and so if for most people "annihilation" means swift destruction rather than slow, then that's what it means (connotatively -- can I adverb that word?). That shift may leave us without a good, concise word for slow destruction, but that doesn't mean we can drag "annihilation" back to that meaning just by pointing at the dictionary.

I'm going to go stuff my inner language nazi back into its cage now.