Impenetrable Language

Obscure and impenetrable language conveys a sense of expertise

Dan Ariely

Have you been in a situation in which the person you talk to speaks and you don’t get anything? I have in a variety of cases:

• Worked for 3 months on the same team with a statistician
• Spent time with Systems and DevOps folks speaking their language
• Discussed some renovation projects with a variety of contractors
• I have a 5-year-old

The common thing between these situations is that the person in front of me may speak with excitement and a lot, and I only catch a fraction of what’s said, and most certainly not the meaning. Many of these scenarios are harmless and funny, but some aren’t. Sometimes, the language can be used maliciously. For example, some of the contractors I spoke with convinced me to do unnecessary repairs or justified expenses without me understanding what they meant. Subpar and expensive work followed.

How does that work?

Each discipline forms terminology and professional jargon that’s used between experts to understand each other and to transfer knowledge. Knowing that language creates a sense of belonging to an exclusive group of people. We are used to accepting that people know things better than us in almost all areas. So it is expected that professionals in an area use the professional language. The caveat is, that they’re expected to do that between each other. When these words are used outside of the professional context or during a negotiation with a person with different expertise, it could indicate a few things:

• Lack of awareness that the other person doesn’t understand everything
• An attempt to coerce approval based on expertise, also known as an “Appeal to authority” – and is a logical fallacy.

For example, in the previous sentence, I could use “Argumentum ad verecundiam” instead of “Appeal to authority” and would use obscure language myself, trying to sound like an expert, while I’m really not.

My expectations about expert language

We can’t assume bad intent when obscure language is used in a conversation with us. We can, however, be aware that many experts would be able to switch their language depending on the audience. I have two relatives who are university professors in different technical areas. I’ve had plenty of conversations with them on their work without hearing a single challenging or jargon word.

It is also possible to introduce necessary expert words by explaining them. For example, the wordpress.com pricing advertises “Global edge caching”.

Many consumers of that information would understand it but most would have no idea what it is. So there’s a tooltip introducing the terminology, this way making it fair.

The construction worker should also be able to explain why tiles can or can’t be put on a specific foundation in a language that I understand, so should the project manager explain Scrum and the Systems engineer who wants to use AWS for their project should be able to explain why without a single BS word.

The 5-year-old is forgiven.

How to identify red flags

My strategy is to ask for an explanation when I hear something that I don’t understand. When I ask too many questions and I keep not understanding, a red flag appears. It still doesn’t necessarily mean the other person is ill-intended. It might mean I didn’t do my homework with a glossary. In that case, we may need to bring out somebody else to the conversation who is fluent in the language. Otherwise, we have a communication failure, and the communication failure can lead to bigger problems.

TL;DR – “Oh shit, I don’t understand a word they’re saying, they must be an expert” needs to become “Oh shit, I don’t a word they’re saying. Do I ask them to slow down and explain or shall I call Saul?”

PS. I’ve remotely touched on the subject of communication failures in my post about Active Listening, which is probably one of my best here at all times. Check it out.