ah ... i see the disconnect.

I typically think in terms of "random variable" (which is really a function or mapping). The classic sense is say the value of a die roll, but the term clearly has wider utility than that.

One could have an occurrence to be, say, regular, but the person met random.
For example, one might write a program that outputs a random letter every 10 seconds. The occurrence is regular, but the value is random. (Or one might view the occurrence as a coupling of the time-stamp along with the message at that time.) This is a case where if two people were communicating about it, even if they were very sure about what they meant, they might ask a few questions of each other to confirm, "ah, yes, we agree what we mean by this."

I'm not sure how the word is used in a literary or other sense. But in the simulation world, it can modify just about any noun, although the particular intrepetation might take some explanation.

I *have* heard a lot of college and hs students using the word 'random' to refer to other things - stuff they don't understand, or like, or agree with it. I'm not sure when I first noticed this, but I think it's been going on for a long time in some circles - probably well before the recent period of meteoric rise of the internet (but maybe not so long ago as its creation).