Like the word "orthogonal" - always know I'm talking to a techie when that one rears its head.
I guess there just comes a point where you've solved so many optimization problems that it's hard to not think of a bunch of solutions with different attributes as being embedded in an N-dimensional space?
Versus
That is an entirely different concern.
The second is more approachable but requires an adverb to have the same meaning, and adverbs are also discouraged. I think orthogonal is fine.
So I guess we could nitpick over "entirely" and "basically" just as easily. Maybe he should have just singled out the engineers and other pedants.
I tend to use "mutually independent" instead of "orthogonal" when talking with non-tech people.
It feels analogous to the widespread use of "exponentially" to mean "a lot" or "quickly" which is a really bad, silly thing. The difference is that few physicists and mathematicians misuse "exponentially" in casual conversation, whereas you are claiming that software people deliberately misuse "Big O". I'm not sure I believe you but either way this seems regrettable.
Take the context of a high-profile art magazine, Frieze. (I googled "frieze increased exponentially"). This is shooting fish in a barrel—but the most egregious example in the first page of hits is this one:
"Seppie in nero’ – squid in its own ink – is my favourite Venetian delicacy. Although customarily served with polenta, I prefer it on thick spaghetti since pasta exponentially increases the naturally squirmy quality of the creatures’ tentacles, creating a Medusa-like mound of inchoate, salty matter."
So you've got an art critic writing slightly pretentiously about food, and he throws in an "exponentially" which has nothing to do with a rate.
This and similar usages of "exponentially" are extremely widespread now. People talk about exponential increases without any mental model of the rate of growth as a function of time at all—just the woolly idea that something is growing fast.
"The term "exponentially" is often used to convey that a value has taken a big jump in short period of time, but to say that a value has changed exponentially does not necessarily mean that it has grown very much in that particular moment, but rather that the rate at which it grows is described by an exponential function."
https://books.google.ie/books?id=aVovDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA36&lpg=PA...
The battle is lost on this word, as it is with "literally". To the man on the street "exponentially" really just means "a huge amount" now.
RE that Orwell quote, I have mixed feelings. I agree with it in so far as it means "pick easiest words for your audience at the precision level you need". But in general, words are not equivalents, even if they're listed as synonyms - each word has its own specific connotation. Say, "car" and "automobile". Technically, they refer to the same thing, but they feel different. That subtle emotional difference may not be important in formal setting, but it's an extra dimension of communication in informal cases (like e.g. this comment thread).