Gratuitous Linguistic Distinctions

Words communicate concepts, and anyone who thinks words have some special, objective significance beyond this is foolish.  Concepts do not change, but words are contrived, used, modified, and abandoned as needed, even when the users do not directly think about the true arbitrariness and disposability of language.  Words are inevitably used to define other words, and those words can be switched out for others as is most convenient for clarifying the speaker's ideas or helping the audience understand those ideas.  There is always an underlying randomness to how language is initially created, however consistent its sounds and words might be beyond the starting point, but even more random is the attempt to distinguish synonyms as if the ideas they are associated with are truly distinct.

There are numerous examples of words used interchangeably on a regular basis that some would strongly insist actually refer to different things, such as feeling (like anger or sadness, not physical pain) and emotion, fact and truth, moral and ethical, and movie and film.  Each of these pairs, in reality, can refer to exactly the same idea(s).  What a fool a person must be if they do not understand that many people use one member of the pair in place of the other without contradiction or intellectual error!  As I have elaborated upon multiple times before here, there is no such thing as a non-arbitrary language, although consistent language and non-arbitrary grasp of concepts are both entirely possible.  However, with distinctions such as the aforementioned ones some try to enforce, the arbitrariness increases significantly.

Perhaps attempting to distinguish certain words makes someone feel sharp, but it is far from intelligent and helpful to do so.  For those who try to needlessly make language even more arbitrary than it inherently is--for no sound from the human tongue or written symbol has intrinsic linguistic meaning other than whatever the individual speaker/writer means by it--dividing otherwise synonymous terms like "moral" and "ethical" might provide a feeling of illusionary sophistication or of fitting into a pre-established group.  They might feel or believe they have accomplished something important, but they have only introduced the potential for more unnecessary linguistic confusion.

Little to nothing is accomplished by these especially arbitrary and vague distinctions of language other than the treatment of identical concepts as if they are as separate as different words.  Rational minds do not try to divide or multiply words referring to concepts that reduce down to the same thing simply for the sake of doing so, and irrational minds will likely either embrace conceptual error or fall into puzzlement when words are used in this way.  The entire social purpose of words is communication of ideas.  Only the contents of one's own mind can be directly proven and experienced, so I cannot know if other people truly understand what I mean by my words, but there is no need or benefit to continually dividing words when they revolve around the same concepts.