I had the same thought about nominal vs anomaly. When the word for a good thing is so close to the word for a bad thing, that's bad. Perhaps they have a standard where they've banned the speaking of "anomaly" on all operations audio channels. I'd ban it.
Me too. Look at definition 5 at Merriam Websters [1]. I think that definition must be related to definition 3 something is insignificant if it is approximately in line with expectations.
I was wondering what they actually mean by "nominal." According to the dictionaries I can find it means something like "in name only" which doesn't seem appropriate to the context.