Jargon: The Stories We Tell to Belong

“Ankita, you use too much jargon”, said a friend when I was telling her what my company, Hiya Global does.

She was right.

At work, my vocabulary is filled with acronyms, technical terms, and words that mean a great deal inside certain rooms, but very little outside them. I hadn’t noticed how much until she said it. And then I couldn’t stop noticing.

I thought about it and realised it goes back to the early days of my career. The really early days. Back then, I was a trainee engineer at a telecom company. We were given loads of material to read and my mind was blown by how little I understood. I had to constantly go back to the glossary. For someone who took pride in her technical ability, this was unacceptable. So I did what felt logical at the time. I learned the language. What the terms meant, how to use them, when to reach for them. Somewhere in those early years, an idea took hold.

If you use technical terms, you sound smart, like you know what you’re doing.

I was surrounded by lots of capable and experienced engineers. Using their language was the fastest way to signal that I belonged in the same room. It worked. Or at least it felt like it worked, which is close enough when you’re starting out and slightly terrified.

Problem is, the idea carried even when the room changed.

I moved out of core engineering into marketing. Still dealing in tech, still dealing in systems and processes, but talking to very different people. The jargon followed me anyway. By then, it was just how I spoke. Listen to any podcast I’ve been on and you’d know exactly what I mean.

When my friend pointed it out, I started thinking why. I am not trying to prove anything about my knowledge anymore. My audience is decidedly non-technical. Too much jargon doesn’t impress them. It alienates them. So what was I doing?

The honest answer is perhaps that jargon does three things, and not all of them are about communication.

The first is that it makes you acceptable. When you walk into a room and speak the language of that room, you are telling a story about yourself without using first person. I belong here. I have done the work. You don’t need to question my presence. The trainee engineer reaching for technical vocabulary is exactly that. I was trying to be precise, but also fit in. I was trying to enter a story that the people around me already were a part of. The right words were the fastest way in.

The second is that it creates community. Every group that shares a language shares a story about itself. Doctors in a ward. Startup founders in a pitch meeting. Potterheads recognising each other across a room. Gen Z’s (enough said!) The jargon is more than language here, it is the story the group tells about its own coherence. You speak the language, you’re in. You don’t, you’re outside it. It is the invisible entry ticket that is earned, and no formal decision needed to be made by anyone. The door just stays closed.

The third is authority. And this is where it gets uncomfortable.

Authority jargon is a story told specifically to prevent questions. The consultant who speaks in frameworks. The politician who answers in process language. The manager who delivers bad news wrapped in words like restructuring and rightsizing and organisational realignment. The complexity is not incidental. It is the point. If you can’t quite follow it, you are less likely to challenge it. The story being told is not just I know what I’m talking about. It is you are not equipped to disagree with me.

This is jargon as control. It is not blunt, or obvious, or even ruthless. It is much softer, the kind that works precisely because it sounds like expertise rather than evasion.

Which brings me back to my friend’s question. Or rather the question it left me with.

If I am no longer trying to prove myself, and my audience doesn’t need the technical language, and the jargon isn’t making anything clearer, then what story am I still trying to tell? And who am I still telling it to?

The jargon stayed long after the room it was built for had changed. And it took someone speaking plainly to make that visible.

Plain language is disarming in a way jargon never is. It has nowhere to hide. When someone strips the vocabulary back and just says what they mean, it asks you to do the same. And that is, it turns out, a much harder thing than it sounds.

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This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .

This is a series about storytelling beyond a craft. As something we live inside. In memory, in conversation, and in the way we understand what happens to us. Read all posts here.

I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.