Good call, Jim — Being an anal retentive word geek, I try to restrain my use of the ones I am guilty of to when they are literally* appropriate. But your comment, and the laughable example usage in the article, make me consider trying to break the habit when among people that I only suspect of being comfortable with them, and instead going deliberately to less precise language — if only so I’m not confused with the a@@hats that toss out stuff like “asymptotic profit.”

And you called it on developers** — the ones I work with usually get what I mean when I use those terms, but don’t throw them around themselves. The problem for me is coming from a science geek family, and so having some science/information science geek friends, some (not all) of us are comfortable with these terms in casual conversations when they serve their original, denotative purpose.

*Old school definition, before the world went upside-down.

**Being a word geek, I can’t quite buy “engineers” yet for the state of software development as a discipline.