Common expressions

Before I begin, I admit - I'm pedantic. I see this as a source of pride. In my experience, the source of the vast majority (> 2 SD) of disagreements between myself and other people are semantic in nature. A more clean and precise use of language is something I aspire to.

With that in mind, anyone who uses the following figures of speech instantly lose my respect:

99%

99% of people who use the number 99% don't actually mean what they say. They just mean most. But instead of using the word most, they try to puff up their argument by claiming what is usually, in context, a preposterous majority. If you are actually confident of the data and want to say 99%, just use 2.5 standard deviations instead - it means the same thing, and makes me want to trust you more.

democratization

When people use this term, they use it to describe the cost of participation decreasing. This is, strictly speaking, accurate. People who use this term also use it to imply that there will, in the future, be a more even distribution of returns because of this decreasing cost of participation. The problem with this theory is that all secondary (or higher order) human properties, that is to say properties that depend on other properties, are necessarily distributed in a Pareto distribution. This will always be the case because primary human properties are always (as far as I can tell) distributed in a Gaussian distribution.

community

See here.

This list is short right now because I've forgotten a number of figures of speech that deeply annoy me; it will be updated in the future when I remember or run across said phrases.