Antijargon Project |
May 5th, 2013 |
| words |
When a group of people talk to each other a lot they develop terms
that they can use in place of larger concepts. This makes it easier
to talk to people inside the group, but then it's harder to talk about
the same ideas with people outside the group. If we were smart enough
to keep up fully independent vocabularies where we would always use
the right words for the people we were talking to, this wouldn't be an
issue. But instead we get in the habit of saying weird words, and
then when we want to talk to people who don't know those words we
either struggle to find words they know or waste a lot of time
introducing words. Especially when the group jargon term offers only
a minor advantage over the non-jargon phrasing I think this is a bad
tradeoff if you also want to speak to people outside the group.
Referenced in: What should "counterfactual donation" mean?
Recently I've been working on using as little jargon as possible. Pushing myself to speak conventionally, even when among people who would understand weird terms a little faster, can be frustrating, but I think I'm also getting better at it.
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