Every acronym we use without explaining is a quiet decision about who belongs in the conversation and who does not.
Our sector speaks a language that almost no one outside it can follow, and a good number of people inside it only pretend to. We move through clusters, modalities, frameworks, and three-letter names for everything, and we do it so fluently that we forget it is a dialect at all. We tell ourselves this is precision. Often it is the opposite. The specialised word lets us sound certain while staying vague, agree in a meeting without actually agreeing, and pass a plan along without anyone admitting they did not fully understand it. Language is not a neutral tool in our work. It is one of the quiet ways power decides who gets to take part.
The clearest cost is exclusion, and it runs in the direction we can least afford. The people most fluent in our jargon tend to be the people furthest from the crisis: the ones who sit near the funding, the planning, and the working language. The people closest to the need, including the communities we serve and much of our own national staff, are asked to operate in a vocabulary that was not built with them in mind. A community member cannot challenge a plan described in terms designed to be understood only by specialists. A new colleague cannot flag a flawed assumption buried inside an acronym they are still too unsure to ask about. We have built a working language that quietly raises the cost of participation for exactly the people whose participation matters most.
There is a second cost that lands on the work itself. Jargon hides disagreement. When a word means slightly different things to the five people using it, everyone can nod and leave the room believing in a shared plan that does not exist. The gap only surfaces later, in the field, when the thing we all agreed to turns out to have been five different things. Plain language forces the disagreement into the open early, where it is cheap to resolve, instead of leaving it to emerge late, where it is expensive and lands on the people relying on us.
We should be fair about why the dialect exists. Some technical terms are genuinely useful shorthand among people who share the same precise meaning, and inventing new words for old concepts every year would help no one. The problem is not that specialist language exists. It is that we use it by default, with everyone, including the people it shuts out, and we rarely stop to ask whether the shorthand is still carrying meaning or has hardened into a badge of belonging.
The fix is a discipline, not a style guide. Speak and write so the person furthest from the room could follow it. As a working test, if a sentence about our work would not make sense to a parent waiting at a distribution point, it probably is not as clear to anyone else as we think either. Say the acronym in full the first time, every time, and treat doing so as competence rather than a sign that someone in the room is slow. Translate the plan into the language of the people it affects before it is finished, not after, and treat their inability to follow it as a flaw in our writing rather than a gap in their knowledge. And make it safe to ask what a word means, by having the most senior person in the room be the first to admit when they are not sure, because juniors copy what leaders do far more than what leaders say.
If a sentence about our work would not make sense to a parent waiting at a distribution point, it probably is not as clear to anyone else as we think.
None of this asks us to dumb down serious work. Clarity is harder than jargon, not easier. It takes more thought to say a thing plainly than to hide it inside a familiar term, which is part of why we reach for the term. But plain language is one of the most direct ways we have to widen the room, and widening the room is most of what we say we are trying to do. The door is ours to open, one sentence at a time, and the people on the other side of it have been waiting longer than we like to admit.