Anglais, por Favor!

Are you overly infatuated with jargon? Do you say things like "We need to reboot this project?" when you mean "start over"? Do you give directions with "Port!" and "Starboard!" or something similar? Are your handwritten notes filled with BCNU and @-sign declarations?

It may be time to back off of this a notch, friends.

I love the shorthand of jargon, and have embraced it in every field I have ever entered, from sales to writing to radio announcing to Web development, but come on, people, as ubiquitous as texting and the Web are, not everyone is everywhere—or wants to be.

We are just coming through a period of about three months where The Media discovered Twitter. By summer they'll be on to the Next Big Thing, but right now we are seeing the service mentioned several times per day, in several contexts and in several outlets. Once limited to technical blogs and Web sites, Twitter exploded in late February and early March and suddenly there were stories about Twitter in specialty magazines and mainstream magazines alike. It was on TV news stories and in TV episodes and commercial advertising even bought into it, literally, paying people to tweet about products.

The backlash will be here in about a week; ten days, tops.

Until then, it might be well to remember the first rule of Web Design: Not Everyone Uses The Web The Way We Do. Just as not everyone has a wide-screen monitor attached to a mighty network, just as not everyone has had the benefit of years and years of Doing This, whatever "this" might actually mean, just as not everyone has JavaScript enabled, not everyone is hip to the grooviness that is Twitter.

People use jargon as shorthand. When I say to a fellow pilot I was afraid I might stall the airplane, I'm talking about an aerodynamic stall, having nothing to do with the engine. But every year some Cub Reporter will ask someone at an airport why a plane crashed, get the reply "He stalled, coming in for a landing" and dutifully report on the news that night that the engine quit. That's not an effective use of the language. You have not effectively communicated what happened to the airplane if someone goes away thinking it was an engine problem.

My grandmother used to pepper our Christmas and birthday cards with medical jargon. She worked at a hospital and understood that et meant and, but nobody at our home did and we came away not nearly as impressed with Gramma's greetings as she might have thought we were.

The whole point of communication is the transfer of an idea from one person to (at least) one other. You're supposed to be richer for having received the message, not confused or left wondering what the author might have had for lunch that would cause them to send such a cryptic, confusing message.

You may know what a re-Tweet is. You may know the meaning of @ in a top-level domain and the meaning of @ in Twitter, but don't assume that anyone else does. Within the Twitter community it's perfectly acceptable, but be careful using that kind of thing elsewhere, because an awful lot of people aren't going to bother looking up what it is you meant, they will just judge you poorly for not having said what you mean.

We don't all have modems. We don't all have skillion-color wide-screen monitors. We don't all have Flash. We don't all have every flavor of Web browser. And we don't all hang out on Twitter, so we don't all know what it is that you're trying to say.