- Use “canonical” when you mean “usual” or “standard.” As in, “the canonical example of talking like a physicist is to use the word ‘canonical.’”
- Use “orthogonal” to refer to things that are mutually-exclusive or can’t coincide. “We keep playing phone tag — I think our schedules must be orthogonal”
- “About” becomes “to a first-order approximation”
- Things are not difficult, they are “non-trivial”
- Large discrepancies are “orders of magnitude apart”
- Refer to coordinates and coordinate systems. “I got shafted” becomes “I took one up the z-axis”
- Any actual personal experience becomes “empirical data.” i.e. a burn on your hand is empirical data that the stove is hot.
- You’re not being lazy, you are in your "ground state"
- A semi-educated guess is an "extrapolation"
- You aren’t ignoring details, you are "taking the ideal case"
- A tiny amount is “vanishingly small” or “negligible.” Really small is “infinitesimal”
- You aren’t overweight, you are "thermodynamically efficient"
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