I'd say the concept is meta to the content.
Like the programmer at the airport that kept counting his luggage and coming up one short. (Off-by-one error joke)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_approximation#Colloquial_usage
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These terms are also used colloquially by scientists and engineers to describe phenomena that can be neglected as not significant (e.g. "Of course the rotation of the Earth affects our experiment, but it's such a high-order effect that we wouldn't be able to measure it" or "At these velocities, relativity is a fourth-order effect that we only worry about at the annual calibration.") In this usage, the ordinality of the approximation is not exact, but is used to emphasize its insignificance; the higher the number used, the less important the effect. The terminology, in this context, represents a high level of precision required to account for an effect which is inferred to be very small when compared to the overall subject matter.
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