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Maybe I need to stop using “tautological”, “orthogonal”, etc in my speech… they are so ingrained into me from academic settings but in hindsight and in a professional context there are definitely people politely nodding and either thinking “I’ll look that up later” - or more commonly they’ll know the words just fine and instead it’s “why not just say ‘obvious’ / ‘unrelated’ / etc”.

I like trying to be precise but I think it’s coming at the cost of actual understanding/conveying the wrong status-signal (I don’t want an elitist vibe at work either!)



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