Energy

Energy is a word that is used in combination with many other words to produce many sciency sounding terms. Thus you get positive energy, negative energy, transcendental energy, universal energy etc which nobody explains in terms that you can understand.

Once a person asked me,'How much energy do you transmit to those around you?' I did not know what I was supposed to answer so I asked him what he meant by energy. But as so often happens, by the time I finished dictating my question to Jaya the conversation had moved on to some other topic. When Jaya asked him my question he just smiled and continued talking about something else.

This reminded me of what Carl Sagan said in The Burden of Skepticism:

Occasionally, by the way, I get a letter from someone who is in "contact" with an extraterrestrial who invites me to "ask anything." And so I have a list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, "Please give a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem." Or the Goldbach Conjecture. And then I have to explain what these are, because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat's Last Theorem, so I write out the little equation with the exponents. I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like "Should we humans be good?" I always get an answer. I think something can be deduced from this differential ability to answer questions. Anything vague they are extremely happy to respond to, but anything specific, where there is a chance to find out if they actually know anything, there is only silence.