I just tried searching HN for occurrences of "is orthogonal", and it does seem that most uses would be better served with "unrelated". In some cases, however, o

I just tried searching HN for occurrences of "is orthogonal", and it does seem that most uses would be better served with "unrelated". In some cases, however, orthogonal sounds more appropriate, and the reason are the geometric associations that it evokes. For example in the sentence "Having chip/pin is orthogonal to the card being a credit or debit card", orthogonal evokes the image of a contingency table where all the cells are non-zero. The word "unrelated" doesn't have the same effect despite being synonymous.