This happened on a Tuesday.
It was 12:17 pm, which is a very specific time, because it was when everyone in the meeting was thinking about lunch, but pretending not to.
The person presenting was important. You could tell by the way everyone angled their bodies toward them, like sunflowers tracking light. The slides were beautiful. Clean fonts and big, confident headings that read:
- “Scalable partnerships”
- “Value-driven transformation”
Somewhere between slide eleven and slide twelve, a thought floated into my head, uninvited, like a pigeon in a food court:
‘What the hell are we actually talking about?’
Not in a sarcastic way. In a way that if someone hit pause on the meeting and asked, “Okay, in clear words, what are we trying to do?” I’m not sure anyone could answer in a crisp sentence.
I’ve been in rooms like that more times than I’d like to admit. The strange part is that the people in these rooms are not only smart, but they care. They want to do good work.
But all this jargon, the words that are supposed to make life easier, slowly drains the oxygen from the room. And the way it does it is more insidious than you think.
Toxic trait 1: Jargon is a costume
Every group has its own language. It’s like a handshake you perform with your mouth. In startup circles, people talk about “seed round” and “pivot” and throw around initials like they’re tossing confetti.
In universities, simple ideas arrive wrapped in long words, protected as if placed behind museum glass. In large organisations, you’ll hear sentences that circle the runway but never quite land.
Some of that language is useful if it helps people move quickly inside a shared world. It’s fine for doctors to say “myocardial infarction” to other doctors because it’s medically precise.
But some of the use of jargon is theatre. Elegantly presented ways of saying, “I belong here. I know the dialect. I’ve learned the script.”
I’ve watched people’s vocabulary shift the moment someone senior walks into the room. Words stretch. Ideas float upward into abstraction. Sentences get smoother and less specific. It’s no longer, “Do you understand me?” It becomes, “Do I sound like I deserve this seat?”
When language becomes a costume, people speak up only to look intelligent and to fit in, rather than to be understood.
When that gets rewarded, when the most polished voice wins, making your voice clear becomes something people slowly, silently give up on.
Toxic trait 2: Jargon locks the door
Jargon can help insiders move faster, but it can close the door on everyone else.
Sometimes that’s innocent. If you’ve used a term for ten years, it stops feeling technical. It just feels normal. You forget what it was like not to know it.
But sometimes it isn’t innocent.
Complicated language can be a way to control a room. If you speak in a way others don’t fully grasp, you set the terms of the conversation. You hold the map and leave everyone else guessing at the terrain.
You can feel it in certain meetings. Someone says: “We’re implementing a transformation framework to unlock scalable growth vectors.”
And the room goes still. Not because everyone understands, but because no one wants to be the person who raises a hand and says, “What does any of that mean?”
An unfortunate truth with all this is that sometimes the person delivering the line can’t translate it into plain language either. Like before, they’re wearing it as a costume to look good to someone else.
When jargon works like this, it creates invisible hierarchies. The people who appear to “get it” seem elevated and the people who don’t feel diminished and excluded.
Once that happens, collaboration and curiosity thins out. The room may look united, but there’s no longer an honest even playing field. Worse still, they may stop turning up at all.
Toxic trait 3: Jargon masks the truth
This is the darkest version of jargon because it conceals reality. You’ll notice it when hard things are described in soft, blurry ways.
- They don’t say layoffs. They say right-sizing.
- They don’t say budget cuts. They say resource reallocation.
- They don’t say Tony is struggling. They say we’re addressing underperformance in middle-level management.
The harsher the reality, the softer the language becomes.
This protective use of jargon gives people space to avoid accountability. If nothing is concrete, nothing can be tested, and if nothing is understood, nothing could possibly be wrong.
You can sit through an update like this and realise, halfway through, that ten minutes have passed without a single sentence you could hold to any scrutiny.
That’s dangerous. Because when people don’t fully understand what’s being proposed, they can’t make good decisions – for either themselves or the business.
The padding of jargon cushions the speaker, but leaves the team exposed.
Final thoughts
Clarity is a gift you hand to other people. It tells them what’s going on, where things are heading, and what part they can play next.
The best communicators I’ve worked with aren’t the ones with the widest vocabulary. They’re the ones who can take a complicated idea and make it feel simple without making it small.
While jargon has its uses, its toxic traits so often get in the way. So here’s a small habit that I use, that you can take away with you.
Before I send an email, I pause to ask: What’s the point I’m trying to make? And why should they care?
Then I read the message as if I were the other person. Would I know what this is about? Would I know what to do next? Would I even finish the email?
If the answer is yes, I send it.
If not, I edit and try again.
I might shorten it; flip the sentence order; replace broad words with specific ones. And, along with all these, definitely kill the jargon.
Then, with just a touch of time, I can turn it into writing that others will find useful.
