@Rashad - I'm going to play devil's advocate here. My dictionary defines societal as a technical term, and as I imagine that getting on for 99% of people aren't professional or academic social scientists, they would have little or no interest in reading the sort of sociology book where the term is likely to come up.

There are some social scientists, however, for whom the distinction appears to be an important one, and I imagine that they know perfectly well what the difference is. And it's not a replacement; you'll find plenty of examples of both words being used together at Google Books. Here's one explanation of the difference:

"Accordingly, though the term social determinants of health is widely used, here we employ the term societal determinants to refer to the structural forces that affect health. Strictly speaking, the social determinants refer to those factors related to interactions among people and communities, whereas societal determinants emphasize a broader array of structural influences" - Textbook of International Health: Global Health in a Dynamic World, Yogan Pillay, Timothy H. Holtz

This seems to gel with the definition at The American Heritage Dictionary:

"Of or relating to the structure, organization, or functioning of society."

That would be the word that Craig thinks isn't a word, or a word that's less than ten years old. The word that goes back at least to 1907, when William Graham Sumner, the first professor of Sociology at Yale, used it in his book 'Folkways'.

And it goes back even earlier than that, this 'new' word. The Online Etymology Dictionary puts its first appearance at 1873, and sure enough here it is in The Official Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the Third Constitutional Convention (Ohio), dated 1873:

"And it is right that it should do so, as it goes down to the very substratum of societal conditions"

But perhaps the best differentiation I've seen is from Michael Mann, professor of Sociology at UCLA:

"Human beings need to enter into social power relations, but they do not need social totalities. They are social, but not societal, animals" (The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1)

In other words, in this technical distinction, social refers to relations between individuals, between members of society, while societal refers to the relationships with the structures of that society. For most of us this is a distinction we don't need to make, but that doesn't mean that it is not an important distinction for some.

I would like to add that I know next to nothing about sociology; this is just the result of a bit of googling and doing a Google Books Search.

All specialisations have little differences like this that are meaningless to the rest of us. For example, I wonder how many people know (or care about) the difference between a historian and a historiographer, between judgement and judgment (in the UK). There are hundreds of thousands of words used by specialists that I don't know and don't miss, but that doesn't mean they don't have a place in the lexicon.

As for using alternative words instead of simpler ones, I could also ask you why you use 'comprehend' when there's the perfectly good 'understand'. In these terms, isn't comprehend just as redundant?

@Jasper - A bit off topic, but I couldn't help noticing that the commenter at your first link refers to 'the effete pronunciation of "literally" as "litrally".' -which makes me effete, apparently. At Oxford Online I seem to have a choice - /ˈlɪt(ə)rəli/. Funnily enough, Oxford Advanced Learner's shows /ˈlɪtərəli/, but in their recording that e is barely audible. But I notice that there's a difference between the British recording and the American pronunciation where the e is much more distinctive. So for 'effete' read British, no doubt.

@jayles - it's my theory that both Polish and German have phrasal verbs, and that German is a half-way house between Polish and English.

Polish has sixteen prefixes based on prepositions which are regularly put at the beginning of verbs. So, for example,we have the basic (perfective) verb form 'chodzić' - go (on foot).

Then we have wchodzić - enter, go in (w = in), wychodzić - go out (wy = out), przychodzić - come, arrive (przy = at), przechodzić - pass, go through (przez = through), etc.

And in German we have ausgeben and eingeben etc. Why I say German is in between Polish and English is that in Polish the preposition and verb are always together, in German they're sometimes together, in the infinitive for example, and sometimes separated, whereas in English they're always separated.

When I suggest this to my Polish students, they just look at me in bewilderment, but it's my theory, and I'm sticking to it.

@jayles - On Ngram, for 'for_CONJ' I'm getting 'no valid Ngrams to plot', although it's working for 'for_ADP' OK.

From what I can see poking round in dictionaries, it tends to be found more in literary than academic work. But that's only a hunch, for I don't have any real evidence.

@sundy - of course you're right, which is why, in EFL, we refer to this as the Unreal past. We only have to compare it with any other verb - 'If he acted like that at my party, I'd throw him out' - this can only be about an unreal event in the present / future - the 'would' in the result clause tells us that. If it was about the past, we'd use a past or present tense in the result clause, as in the cad example (which seems to be very popular in the States).

@Jasper - I don't think it's likely to spill over into Poland unless things get very nasty. The Polish people were very strong supporters of the Orange revolution, however, and have a strong affinity with the people of Western Ukraine. Although it wasn't always like that; when Lviv / Lwów was part of Poland there was a lot of very nasty fighting between Poles and Ukrainian nationalists. Most of the Poles from Lwów went to Kraków after the war, I think.

@jayles - there were large communities of Poles in the west, both in villages and in Lwów, and presumably in the large aristocratic estates as well. There was a similar situation in Lithuania, with a large Polish population of Vilnius / Wilno, which was Polish territory until the war. But it was a bit like Hungary before Trianon. At one time Poland stretched to the Black Sea, but of course many of the people who lived on Polish territory weren't actually Poles, but Ukrainians, Lithuaninas, Tartars etc (not to mention the Jews and Germans who lived in current Polish territory. Polish borders are today more or less back to where they started, reflecting the early Poland of 1200 or so.

Do you have a link to that map

Perhaps they're Sean Connery fans.

I don't think there's anything new here. This is Oxford Online:

used before the second or further of two or more alternatives (the first being introduced by a negative such as ‘neither’ or ‘not’) - to which we could add 'never'

Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary calls it rather formal.

The following are from the Sonnets at the very beginning of the Complete Shakespeare at Project Gutenberg, without even looking at the plays, nor even all the sonnets:

"O carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen,"

"Then happy I that love and am beloved
Where I may not remove nor be removed."

"That heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief,"

" I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame,
Nor thou with public kindness honour me"

"When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but time decays?"

" Let not my love be called idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show,'

"Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul,'

"Weighs not the dust and injury of age,
Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place,"

Ah! Phrasal verbs! The foreign learner's delight. But you're talking about two types here - literal and metaphorical. The idea of putting on and taking off clothes is pretty literal - you put them on your body and take them off your body - and shouldn't create too many problems (I also teach foreign learners). But when it comes to the task, that's more metaphorical, and that's where the problems start.

There's not often a great logic to phrasal verbs, and the only real way for students to learn them is through exposure and use. Mind you, even when metaphorical, the particles often have common meanings, for example 'up' often means 'completely' - 'Come on, drink up', 'Tidy up' etc. But I'm sure you've got books which tell you that.

@jayles: I don't think deprecated, necessarily, just seen as a bit old-fashioned.

Oxford Online calls it 'literary' and OALD and Cambridge (learners' dictionaries)
call it old-fashioned or literary.