I use the word "ontology" in technical discussions several times a day, in the text-mining sense.

Ditto, unfortunately.

In the philosophical sense, or the computer science sense? Either way, you're utterly doomed, but if the latter, welcome to one of the many dooms that plague my existence...

In the computer science sense. Except that it wouldn't be surprising if I were dealing with natural language or any other obvious set of references to the world of messy human concepts. But it's not anything like that; this has managed to come up entirely within a domain of what ought to be well defined and technically precise concepts, and in the course of trying to get what seemed like perfectly sensible things done it has turned out that there's an underlying problem that inadequate effort has been given to precisely defining a domain-specific ontology.

When I worked at the EBI (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/), the word was pretty much unavoidable (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Databases/ontology.html)...

IAWTC.

Oh, it can get worse than that. You can find yourself using its horrible offspring, such as folksonomy. And surrounded by neo-PROLOG types with their SPARQLing OWLs of doom. Doom, I say.

You know you're in trouble when you're in soviet russia. No, wait...

"Trouble is in you"?