The Secret Languages You Speak!

We speak many secret languages throughout the day, without even realizing it. The jargon we use both ties us together and sets us apart. It’s important to know when, and when not, to use it.

Has this ever happened to you: Someone overhears a conversation you’ve been in and, afterwards, comments “I couldn’t understand a word you were just saying.”

It’s happened to me plenty of times.

When it does, it’s often because I was speaking marketing jargon a language that’s unique to me and my product-management peers, yet completely different than what I speak while at home with my family, with friends or even strangers.

Jargon is a specialized, often technical, language used by people in a specific field, profession or social group. It’s different than its cousin, slang, which is more informal and often associated with conversation, text messages and other casual social communication among friends.

Here, There and Everywhere

If you think about it, we all speak various forms of jargon depending on where we are, what we’re doing and whom we’re interacting with. Every subculture has its own unique brand of jargon, a place where words and phrases take on a meaning all their own. Police and firefighters have their own language, as do pilots, doctors, attorneys, you name it. If you aren’t part of this exclusive group, the lexicon won’t make much sense to you.

You’ll find plenty of individualized jargon in our workplaces. Accounting and finance speak a completely different language than IT. Engineering has its own jargon, marketing and HR have theirs and so on.

Jargon is what enables group members to communicate effectively with each other.

We speak our own jargon-based language in our personal lives. When watching baseball with my old classmates from Boston, we effortlessly discuss homers, RBIs, slugging percentage and the seventh-inning stretch. We speak our own version of jargon when conversing with our spouse or kids. We even resort to a childlike form of it when making baby-talk with infant.

When you combine jargon-based languages with the earth’s 7,000-plus distinct languages and hundreds of thousands of regional dialects, it’s a testament to our brain’s adaptability that we actually can communicate with each other at all.

What’s equally intriguing is how quickly and seamlessly we transition in and out of these different languages and how many times a day we do it.

Of course, that may be because there’s penalty to be paid if we don’t. Usually that’s limited to an incredulous look and some gentle ribbing from a friend, spouse or coworker. But sometimes it’s much more. When we don’t switch our language to match the group we’re in, we risk not being understood or, equally unpleasant being perceived as arrogant.

That’s what happens on a larger scale when companies lapse into corporate jargon when communicating with outsiders. We’ve all seen plenty of examples of where organizations try to appear important and instead come off looking silly. This hilarious parody video is my favorite.

Our own personal and corporate jargon is everywhere. The key to using it effectively is using it where it belongs.