For example, jealousy and envy have become synonymous in popular discourse. My understanding is that jealousy used to mean something you had and were unwilling to grant to another person or share, where envy described something someone else had which you wanted. This is not a popular distinction.

This concept as applied to politics allows peculiar “vectors” or attentive exploitations for rhetoricians (and more pejoratively propagandists) to exploit ambiguity when they are interpreted by the audience. Other easy examples include “liberal” and “democrat”, “conservative” and “republican”. People will attempt to interpret polemic and fall victim to confirmation bias.

Oddly it seems that where you’d expect semantic diversification in these instances to properly describe political positions more precisely, instead you find a lack of earnest discourse possibly fueled by a general apathy or cynicism towards the issues at hand. Consequentially we seem to grant political labels a certain degree of ambiguity pushing it in the very opposite direction.

I was curious as to how this compared with other trends in conceptual precision regarding religion, slang, and more precise academic vernacular in your experience. Of particular interest is the term “God” after the segmentation of a religion, short lived cultural phrases and the words subsuming their initial meaning, and more rigidly held semantic constructs like chemical nomenclature. It seems each of these falls into a distinct domain wherein concepts need to be verbally communicated to a specific end, and each has a unique way of retaining or dismissing previous definitions and conceptual structures.

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