Troublesome -ages

Four -ages keep causing inconveniences to writers and editors. Somehow writers and editors take 'damages' for plural of 'damage,' which it is not. Damages are given for a damage done; they are not to mean 'damage in more cases than one.' Another -age, wastage, often appears in problematic contexts. There can nothing be something as 'industrial wastages.' Wastage means the process of wasting, loss by wear or waste or an amount that is wasted or lost by wear. Yet another -age, bondage, is often used in wrong context in reports. Writers prefer to write bondage (the state of a slave or a prisoner) as it sounds more formal than bond, a word which should be correct in most contexts. People can be kept in bondage but no two friendly people can have bondage between them; there should rather be a bond of friendship. There is another -age, a jargon for 'link' in most cases, that troubles writers, and, of course, editors. Linkage is often used in the first meaning of the word 'link' --- (someone or) something that connects two or more people, but the primary meaning of the word linkage, the process of linking or being linked, is often stashed away to be expressed in some complex phrases. When an organisation 'forms linkages with' ethnic minority groups, it, in effect, carries out activities or shares information with them. Forming linkages 'struts and frets,' but other choices signify comprehensibility.