The historical meaning of words, the concepts and shades of meaing to which they refer, and the distinction between its usages over time is good history.
This isn’t the folly of citing what a word originally meant, as if that conveys a word’s essence, one of the great essayistic solecisms, which i have certainly committed more than once, nor the textualism that the 5-4 podcast team rightly scorn in former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and his Federalist Society epigones (“none of them are historical linguists, they’re arrogant amateurs who are just picking and choosing from their favourite amicus brief about what fits their partisan goals”). It’s the recognition that different times have different needs of words, and that the same word has different meanings over time, even when the meanings are adjacent or related.
This recent post on the framing and naming of those people who make significant improvements at the margin does the good job of showing how words and concepts change over time. It reminded me of the way Ian Hacking deployed the notion of the environmental niche in his book Mad Travellers.