Yes a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and well... diarrhoea is diarrhea
My point was addressing "tsinghua students..." and "Harvard students..." unless they were literary scholars or grammarians their wield of the language may be at the level of "educated" but still plenty fallible. I'm sure those of us who did any post grad would have met people who were smart in a given axis and otherwise very ordinary along the other axes.
Maybe language is fine if it conveys the intended meaning.