The litmus test for a name change is simple: if a CWE analyst doesn't have a good idea of the issue after reading the name, then it needs to be changed. As a result, we removed a lot of non-specific terms such as "insecure," "improper," and "erroneous." We are slowly building a more consistent vocabulary, but this is still a work in progress.
Some examples include:
Dangerous Functions: this phrase was originally used in 7PK. CWE inherited this phrase from 7PK and used it as the name for CWE-242, until the name was changed in Draft 9. Both the 7PK and CWE descriptions tried to make it clear that this category was for functions that have inherent vulnerabilities that can never be guaranteed to work safely, such as gets(). However, it was sometimes interpreted by people as including any function that has certain risks but can be safe if used properly, such as strcpy().
Overflow of static internal buffer: this phrase was inherited from CLASP and used in CWE-500 in Draft 8 and earlier. The phrase implies a general type of buffer overflow, but the core issue discussed in CLASP is that an object contains a field that hasn't been marked as final, which might enable modification of the field to trigger a buffer overflow. Presumably, other attacks are also possible. In CWE, the non-final field is regarded as a primary weakness in a chain that could have multiple resultant issues, such as an overflow. In this context, the CLASP-style name is describing a consequence, not the underlying weakness.