Agreed. But balance in everything, and this is, I suggest,the kind of word where there should be more resistance to change than in many other cases. Generally speaking I am in favour of going with the flow of spoken language.

However I'd make an exception here. If it loses its precision, it will be very hard to find an adequate substitute, and the language will be poorer.

It is said that when a language dies a way of seeing the world dies, and to a lesser extent something like that can happen when a word loses a precise meaning, without being replaced. Without the word it can even become impossible to have the concept expressed by the word.