The other day, while at a dinner party, a friend casually used the word orthogonal in a discussion on politics.

I lost my appetite.

Why couldn’t he just say unrelated? Using a term from linear algebra while talking about something completely mundane as politics demonstrates a glaring impedance mismatch between casual conversation and pretentious execution.

I think such folks hope that this jargon, through their feeble attempts, will one day reach critical mass. They are trying to spread it through social osmosis. But it is a catalyst for immediate cognitive friction — while the speaker thinks they’re being precise, the listener is burning mental bandwidth trying to filter out the ego.

We’ve allowed a weird symbiosis to form between math textbooks and social conversations, as if using “orthogonal” is somehow part of the everyone’s DNA. I don’t want to go off on a tangent, but the half-life of my tolerance for this is asymptotically approaching zero.

The passage above contains several words that have a precise definition in math and science, but are used often in casual conversation. How many can you identify?

Can we stop whining about people using the word “orthogonal” in daily conversations? The usage is often more appropriate than some of the other words.