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Reader question: Please explain “technically speaking” and this whole sentence: He gets the odd part-time job now and then but, technically speaking, he is unemployed and possibly now unemployable. My comments: He sometimes gets part-time jobs. That means he works and gets paid sometimes. He’s employed, then, isn’t he? Not exactly. Not if you speak strictly, legally, unmistakably by definition. By legal definition, perhaps one is formally declared employed only if one has a full-time job for some time. Different governments must have different rules over how to define employment and unemployment, but the long and short is in the above example the odd part-time job is not considered employment. Loosely speaking, any job is employment, but strictly speaking, it apparently isn’t. Technically speaking, you see, is like being technical, and scientific, strictly following rules and being absolutely exact when we speak. Literally, you can view “technically speaking” as speaking the language of technicians and technocrats – they are strict, perhaps rigid in speech using a lot of jargons sometimes only they themselves understand. Technical people being technical people, you cannot mistake them for that – being technical in speech and unmistakable. In common language, though, technically speaking is usually interchangeable with strictly speaking, meaning “if we want to be exact”. | 
