Life, species, gene, organism - we don’t actually have consistent definitions of what those are. Biology is the science of fluid spectrums, so any rigid classification you’d propose breaks down at the edges.
However this is annoying, because especially with the modern fashion that linguistics shall be only descriptive and not prescriptive, like in the past, many words have become more and more ambiguous.
For this reason, misunderstandings have become more and more frequent, especially when using a medium like an Internet forum, which forces conciseness. Now, if you want to be certain that you will be understood correctly, more and more often you are forced to first define exactly many of the words that you intend to use, because the same words may be used by others with different meanings, even if in earlier literature everybody used only the meaning that you want.
I would blame botanists for overloading everyday terms with their own specialised meanings.
Mathematicians are also prone to this, but I guess it's less likely someone will mix up a ring or field in the everyday sense and in the mathematical sense.