What I learned was that “increasing” can imply a continuous series of increments, whereas “monotonically” qualifies that to unambiguously restrict the term to a

What I learned was that “increasing” can imply a continuous series of increments, whereas “monotonically” qualifies that to unambiguously restrict the term to a specific meaning, not the casual one. Much jargon works this narrowing way, to demarcate that the concept should not carry the everyday cluster of associations and meanings, but rather a domain-specific meaning.