Words, Words, Words.... Wolf!!!

Words mean something, or at least they used to. Today, however, it seems that even our language is suffering from egalitarianism.
The degradation of the meaning of words takes many forms. In some cases, we degrade our speech by resorting to the use of obscenities. It isn't merely that obscenities are dirty, foul, or degrading, but that they don't have the same power of language. When we are angry, we often say that we are 'pissed'. But what, exactly, does that mean? There are many words for angry: upset, agitated, perturbed, annoyed, mad, furious, irate, livid.... Where, precisely, does 'pissed' belong in a continuum of such words? Instead of finding a place in the continuum, it covers the whole spectrum, and we lose the nuances of the other words that could have been used. How about insults? Calling someone a #(&*@ (coward - female genitalia) just doesn't carry the same weight as saying that they "have the backbone of a chocolate eclair". Even Archie Bunker calling his son-in-law 'meathead' had more meaning than an obscenity would have.
Another way that words lose their meaning is when we use them improperly, especially in improper comparisons. When we use the word 'rape' to describe a woman that wakes up and regrets having sex with the man she met the night before, we degrade the meaning of the word rape, and therefore the act of rape itself. When people use the word 'jihad' to describe the religious right in this country, we aren't just making the religious right out to be worse, we are saying that actual 'jihad' isn't so bad. John McCandlish Phillips references a number of major columnists in this article in the Washington Post.
All this makes me think of the boy who cried wolf. If we continually degrade our language by trying to make dissimilar things out to be similar, soon we won't be able to tell the wolves from the sheep. A serial rapist? Isn't that just another word for a Casanova?