It isn't just quibbling with the hypothetical.

You might think it poetic, to give one word many meanings, and thereby spread shades of connotation all around. But even poets, if they are good poets, must learn to see the world precisely. It is not enough to compare love to a flower. Hot jealous unconsummated love is not the same as the love of a couple married for decades. If you need a flower to symbolize jealous love, you must go into the garden, and look, and make subtle distinctions - find a flower with a heady scent, and a bright color, and thorns. Even if your intent is to shade meanings and cast connotations, you must keep precise track of exactly which meanings you shade and connote.

It is a necessary part of the rationalist's art - or even the poet's art! - to focus narrowly on unusual pebbles which possess some special quality. And look at the details which those pebbles - and those pebbles alone! - share among each other. This is not a sin.

It is perfectly all right for modern evolutionary biologists to explain just the patterns of living creatures, and not the "evolution" of stars or the "evolution" of technology. Alas, some unfortunate souls use the same word "evolution" to cover the naturally selected patterns of replicating life, and the strictly accidental structure of stars, and the intelligently configured structure of technology. And as we all know, if people use the same word, it must all be the same thing. You should automatically generalize anything you think you know about biological evolution to technology. Anyone who tells you otherwise must be a mere pointless pedant. It couldn't possibly be that your abysmal ignorance of modern evolutionary theory is so total that you can't tell the difference between a carburetor and a radiator. That's unthinkable. No, the other guy - you know, the one who's studied the math - is just too dumb to see the connections.

Narrowness does have virtues, but they are few and counterbalanced by vice. For example, the word evolve didn't originate in biology, it originated in technology.

Evolution (1622), originally meant "unrolling of a book;" it first was used in the modern scientific sense 1832 by Scot. geologist Charles Lyell. Charles Darwin used the word only once, in the closing paragraph of "The Origin of Species" (1859), and preferred descent with modification, in part because evolution already had been used in the 18c. homunculus theory of embryological development (first proposed under this name by Bonnet, 1762), in part because it carried a sense of "progress" not found in Darwin's idea. But Victorian belief in progress prevailed (along with brevity), and Herbert Spencer and other biologists popularized evolution.

Do stars unroll? Is the adaptation of living things to changed circumstances progress? Does knowledge of the word evolution in all of its uses and origins contribute to comprehension of any or all of the uses?

The problem is that narrowness, though "a necessary part of the rationalist's art - or even the poet's art!", often produces bad art, something that only the narrow minded can love because they don't know enough about the subject to discern the differences. They get punked by their own cherished virtues: they don't bother to look.

Narrowness has limited value. That value can be enlarged by serial narrowness, focusing tightly in one domain after another, switching as often as one has the talent and energy to do with skill. It is possible to remain narrow and still make contributions to society, but that just shifts the burden of synthesis to others. One way or another, someone or another must integrate the disembodied knowledge of narrow focus inquiries. Someone must be able to wield the clue stick and nudge the narrow minded off local optima so that they can climb mountains as well as mole hills.

It takes all kinds.