It’s one of my favorite talking points. Language is power. The words you choose to use (or use without thinking) say a lot about your approach to a subject. Choosing when to be formal versus casual is an important consideration for many meetings. Choosing to convey context through the choice of a single word can be very powerful.
When talking about time when an application will be down on purpose: Planned Maintenance > Downtime > Outage
When talking about shared workplace environments: Agile working > Coworking > Shared office
The word choices above may seem interchangeable but they have very different impacts on people who read them. Maintenance is a calming, active word that says that you are choosing to do something. Outage comes across as unplanned and unexpected requiring urgent attention. It’s the same net impact on users from an operational perspective but the reaction from readers will be very different.
A lot of people do not consciously consider word choice when they are communicating. For that matter, most do not think of conversations as being a formal communication. The listener often has a different perspective of what is being messaged than the person sharing. Innumerable circumstances would lead to this situation. If you don’t consider how they are hearing you, you are not communicating effectively.