If you haven't read the full-ish works of Neal Stephenson, there are spoilers here. Then again, if you haven't read at least some of the works of Neal Stephenson, you probably would not find any of this interesting or even approachable.
There are a number of themes that crop up repeatedly in the works of Neal Stephenson. They can also be called "Tropes", as defined at TV Tropes.
A simple example: Strong female hero or co-hero characters:
In fact, that's just about every main female character throughout the books. What does strong mean? For one thing, it means independent. None of these ladies are wallflowers who are going to wait for some prince to come galloping in and save them - they're all armed with either weapons, moral authority, or both. It means innovative - when necessary, they come up with the ideas and make the plans to succeed.
[ skeleton page, under construction ]
Randy discusses how (bull)shit functions in the technical world in Cryptonomicon
Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally.
Charlene's crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn't being told that they were wrong that offended them, though - it was the underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about anything.
Anathem's segregated scientific/scholarly society ("Intramuros") makes a similar distinction with the Orth word bullshytt:
[Quin] thrust out a sheaf of tags sewn into the back of the collar. I could see the logo of a company, which I recognized from ten years ago, although they'd made it simpler. Below it was a grid of tiny pictures that moved. "Kinagrams. They obsoleted Logotype."
I felt old: a new feeling for me.
Orolo had been curious until he'd seen the Kinagrams; now he looked disappointed. "Oh," he said, in a mild and polite tone of voice, "you are talking bulshytt."
I got embarassed. Quin was amazed. Then his face turned red. It looked as if he were talking himself into being angry.
"Fraa Orolo didn't say what you think!" I told Quin, and tried to punctuate it with a chuckle, which came out as a gasp. "It is an ancient Orth word."
"It sounded a lot like--"
"I know! But Fraa Orolo has forgotten all about the word you are thinking of. It's not what he meant."
"What did he mean, then?"
Fraa Orolo was fascinated that Quin and I were talking about him as if he wasn't there.
"He means that there's no real distinction between Kinagrams and Logotype."
"But there is," Quin said, "they are incompatible." His face wasn't red any more; he drew breath and thought about it for a minute. Finally he shrugged. "But I see what you mean. We could have gone on using Logotype."
In Cryptonomicon, at some point, there's a commentary about how programmers / technical people are always telling people they're full of shit. That it isn't an attempt to be offensive in that context, but a way to cut down to the real issue and get it solved.
Likewise, in Anathem, the word 'bullshytt' is defined as having several meanings. Extramuros, it carries the vulgar connotations that we generally think of. Intramuros - where the "technical people" types live - it is a non-offensive way of describing misleading semantics that obscure the real issue.
Reference.com defines 'praxis' as 'practice, as distinguished from theory; application or use, as of knowledge or skills.' In Anathem, the word praxis (and sometimes 'praxic' and referencing an era as 'the Praxic Age') is commonplace, and refers to, essentially, an implemented something. Fraa Jad refers to matches as 'fire-making praxis'. And it isn't limited to physical implementations; Orolo believes that the Thousanders have invented a praxis for manipulating the polycosmos, one that is a learned discipline rather than a machine of some sort.
I was re-reading The Big U when I noticed 'praxis' popping up there, too. After the striking professors back down from trying to turn away a truck driven by a Teamster, 'They all retreated to the other end of the lot for a discussion of theory and praxis as the truck eased up to the loading dock.'
Aha! Another thread that winds through multiple Stephenson novels (it isn't as if 'praxis' is commonplace). As it turns out, it also shows up in two other Stephenson novels:
I know you have torn Alchemy down to it's foundations, and built it back up, and are recording it in a book called Praxis, which will be to Alchemy what Principia Mathematica was to physics.
The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2)
"What is Praxis?" Caroline inquired.
"What Principia Mathematica was to Mechanical Philosophy, Praxis would be to Alchemy," said Isaac.
The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 3)
And, of course, Stephenson isn't just making it up about Isaac Newton: "Probably in about [1696], Newton composes (but does not publish) the essay 'Praxis', the most substantial of his own (al)chemical compositions" according to The Newton Project.
The Big U is full of ideas and references that recur in later books by Neal Stephenson. One of the minor references is Shekondar:
...the Guild generated Shekondar the Fearsome/JANUS 64, the Organism that inhabits and controls the colony. [Keldor died building it].... But out of his death came the King of Two Faces, that which in Techno-Plexor is JANUS 64 and in Magic Plexor, Shekondar the Fearsome.
and then it crops up again in Cryptonomicon:
But Randy does find one [CD] from an evidently Seattle-based band called Shekondar.... Now, Shekondar happens to have been the name of an especially foul underworld deity who played an important role in some of the game scenarios that Randy played with Avi and Chester and the gang back in the old days.
A third reference has popped up in REAMDE, where an MMORPG player by that name is interviewed for the in-game paper:
Steadying himself on an eight-foot wizard's staff as he waded through a knee-high river of blood washing down the market street of Bagpipe Gulch - a community that once prized its status as the "Gateway to Torgai" - Shekondar the Fearsome, a local alchemist, denied that the trend was a negative influence on the town's image, insisting that the influx of "Meat," and the bandits, land pirates, and cutthroats who had come to prey on them, had been a boon to the region's economic development and a bonanza for local merchants, especially those who, like Shekondar, dealt in goods, such as healing potions and magically enhanced whetstones, that were in demand among the newcomers.
The Internet doesn't provide an authoritative source for Shekondar, although it appears to be a popular gamertag with people in the sort of places that I associate with role-playing games, so perhaps it's an old RPG character that is old or obscure enough not to have made the Internet on its own.
[ framework, references needed, may include inaccurate details... ]
Anathem includes a debate between two camps (known under various names at different points in history) between a syntactic universe and a semantic universe. The distinction is that in a semantic universe, "things" exist in and of themselves, and everything is perception of those things. In a syntactic universe, definition is the key rather than perception - "things" exists once they are described by a valid syntax, imposed by a sentient mind.
Snow Crash has a similar distinction regarding the nam-shubs of Enki. These are incantations (speech, words, phrases) which directly translate to actions through people. In a purely syntactic universe, these incantations could not exist, because action would require syntactic agreement between the two parties. The opposite extreme is a semantic universe, where the incantations carry intrinsic meaning that other sentient beings will intrinsically perceive and act upon. In Snow Crash, the Metaverse is a purely syntactic universe. The attempts to usher in a new era of nam-shubs is an attempt to restore a purely semantic universe. In between is the real world, where the story takes place.
A niggling voice in the back of my head suggests that the syntactic/semantic distinction can be applied to The Diamond Age. The "Feed" provides raw atomic building blocks, which are nothing usable by themselves, to nanotechnological devices which use them to build useful items. This is a syntactic worldview, where the nanotechnical engineers perform the act of definition which makes "things" come into being. The Celestial Kingdom, however, has failed to keep up in a nanotechnological world, and wants to create a semantic equivalent for their use - the "Seed". Unlike a feed, which is (to borrow a phrase) "void and without form", a seed is a self-sufficient "thing" that performs actions regardless of the view a sentient mind takes upon them. Seeds are semantic entities.