Talk Like a Physicist

It’s very easy, just rehearse these phrases… and try use them with confidence in every conversation.

• 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”.
• You’re not being lazy, you are in your “ground state”.
• A tiny amount is “vanishingly small” or “negligible”. Really small is “infinitesimal”.
• it’s not a wire, it’s a “conductor”.
• You aren’t overweight, you are “thermodynamically efficient”.

Via Swans on Tea: Talk Like a Physicist Day