In everyday use, hyperbole is the least-noticed component of our language. (See?) It lets us use clinically specific terms like OCD, schizo, bipolar, and psycho, and dilute their meanings for casual, offhanded remarks. The woman primping her hair for more than a second is suddenly OCD about her looks. A person muttering to himself is a schizo. The list goes on.

But to the experts who use these terms on a daily basis, in reference to serious disorders of the brain, everyday use dilutes their meaning. After all, the scarcer a word is in the public’s vocabulary, the more it stands out when finally used properly. Its very value rises. And by contrast, when terms like OCD and bipolar get plucked from their chapters in medical textbooks and get thrown around as slang, the words lose their bite. They stop sounding special.

The same holds true for drugs. For decades, marijuana has been viewed as an illicit substance, not a form of medicine, and some say the problem lies in what people call it. Terms like pot and weed connote recreation. But the plant’s actual name, cannabis, tends to strike people with more of a medicinal edge. Likewise for the names assigned to individual strains, as people are far less likely to accept Purple Haze as something to treat their rheumatoid arthritis than something suggesting formality.

Ultimately, these language gaps motivate us to be more mindful with how we speak. Social progress has already eliminated gay as synonymous with stupid. If only we can treat mental health as equally vital to the greater good.