A Distinction Changes What We Can Notice
A useful distinction does not merely add a definition. It changes the field of observation. Before the distinction, two things may look like one: blame and responsibility, condition and context, pain and commentary around pain, promise and prediction.
Once language separates them, new questions become possible. Which one is happening here? What action belongs to one but not the other? The distinction was not necessarily absent from reality before the words existed. The words make the difference easier to notice, communicate, and revisit.
This is why jargon is not the goal. A term is useful only while it still points to a difference we can see. If the vocabulary remains and the observation disappears, the distinction has become a label.
A living distinction sharpens perception. What matters is not possessing the term. It is being able to notice what the term was created to separate.