Thank you, Atlantic, I was just thinking the same thing myself

When the President's Away, the Journalists Will... Talk About 'Optics' - Politics - The Atlantic Wire

The cliché: It's that time of year again -- time for a president to go on vacation, the opposition to criticize him for it, and the media to roll out a peculiar word: optics. When used in the political sense, optics means a vision of how one is perceived by the electorate. On the topic of President Obama's trip to Martha's Vineyard, Michael Muskal at the Los Angeles Times says "Still, there is the question of political optics, which has annoyed even some liberal critics." "Others say the optics aren’t good if the president is traipsing around a place with yachts and multi-million dollar homes," says Jena McGregor of The Washington Post. "Going to Martha's Vineyard, he might have a problem in the optics, the playground of celebrities, being in a rich person's home," says The Boston Globe."

WTF optics? The aromatics of that word are just not good.