Compression vs. Camouflage: In Defense of Jargon

If you’ve been reading my posts for a while, you could be forgiven for thinking that I’m on a personal crusade against jargon. Buzzwords, corporate dialects, over-engineered sentences, and descriptions that sound like a bad parody of an academic paper — I’ve complained about all of it, loudly and repeatedly. From the outside, it probably looks like I believe all specialized language should be burned, buried, and never spoken of again.

That conclusion, however, would be wrong.

I’m not against specialized language, and I’m not against jargon as such. What I am against is using jargon as a substitute for clarity, or worse, as a way to signal intelligence instead of actually communicating it.

This became very concrete for me recently when I had to summarize my team’s achievements for top management. In our case, that means primarily the CTO — and it’s worth noting that this company has well over a hundred IT teams. In that context, the usual instinct to “explain everything properly” becomes not just impractical, but actively counterproductive.

Managers at that level do not have the time — or frankly the obligation — to read long, nuanced explanations from every single team every two weeks. That is not a criticism. It’s a simple observation about arithmetic. If the CTO were to carefully read multi-page reports from each team, that would be the only thing they did all day. And even then, they would still be behind.

In that environment, brevity is not a preference; it is a survival constraint. You either learn to compress meaning into a small, dense payload, or your message never lands at all.

This is where jargon, used correctly, earns its keep. A single well-chosen technical term can replace an entire paragraph — provided that everyone involved shares the same baseline vocabulary, or at least knows where to look things up when memory fails.

The Intellectual Parkour

At roughly the same time, I ran into the opposite extreme. I was reading a description of a fairly straightforward algorithm — think AVL trees, red-black trees, or something equally uncontroversial. The concept itself was not difficult. The sentence explaining it, however, was a small crime against the reader. I had to read it seven times, not because the idea was complex, but because the sentence was doing intellectual parkour.

Out of curiosity, I counted. It was five levels deep in subordinate clauses, packed with academic filler, and — to make things truly impressive — internally contradictory. The author managed to say several things at once, none of them clearly — or even logically. But man, it sounded wicked smart.

It was jargon used not as compression, but as camouflage.

The Communication Triangle

This is the distinction that actually matters. Concepts should be explained in an accessible way, especially when they are being introduced for the first time. That is not the place for rhetorical flexing. Clear explanations are not a concession to incompetence; they are a sign that the author actually understands what they are talking about.

Professional communication, however, is a different game.

There is a useful analogy here from software engineering: the classic value triangle. You know the one — Fast, Cheap, Good. Pick two. Try to get all three and the universe politely reminds you who’s in charge.

Communication seems to obey a similar constraint. You can optimize for:

• Accessible — easy to understand, low barrier to entry.
• Precise — technically accurate, unambiguous.
• Concise — short enough to fit into a busy person’s mental bandwidth.

Just like in engineering, you don’t get all three at once.

If you aim for Accessible and Precise, it won’t be Concise — you’ll need space to explain context, assumptions, and edge cases. If you aim for Precise and Concise, it won’t be Accessible — you’re going to lean on jargon and shared mental models. And if you aim for Accessible and Concise, Precision is usually the first casualty.

Jargon lives very specifically in the Precise + Concise corner of that triangle. Once a shared vocabulary exists — and once that vocabulary is documented and easily accessible — jargon becomes a powerful efficiency tool. It allows teams to move faster, to reason at a higher level of abstraction, and to avoid re-explaining the same foundational ideas over and over again.

In that sense, jargon is no different from any other tool. Like AI. Like a hammer. On its own, it is neither good nor bad. It becomes a problem only when it is used indiscriminately, or when it is treated as an end rather than a means. A hammer is great for driving nails. It is much less impressive when someone insists on using it to show how strong they are.

Jargon works the same way. Used with care, it saves time and mental energy. Used without restraint, it turns communication into a performance piece that serves the speaker far more than the listener.

Knowing the difference is not about vocabulary size. It’s about intent. And that, more than anything else, is the line I care about.

(Speaking of jargon usage gone wrong… I might have collected quite a few examples in here.)