Your jargon is not a compression algorithm

Saw someone describe domain jargon as "lossless compression" the other day. Expert language is dense encoding of domain knowledge, like a zip file. Insiders decompress it, outsiders can't. Feature not bug.

Cute. It's also doing a lot of work to make exclusion sound like engineering.

When a team says "wing plates" and everyone knows the material, the gauge, the bend sequence, where it goes — sure, that's efficient. But the new person doesn't know what it means. The efficiency is bought with their confusion. And if the people who know the term quit, the "compression" evaporates. It was never stored anywhere. It was in their heads.

That's not expertise made portable. That's expertise with a bus factor of three.

Here's the part that really gets me: compression and obfuscation are structurally identical. Both take input and produce output that's unintelligible without a key. The only difference is intent, and you can't see intent from the outside. "Wing plates" compresses real knowledge. "Synergize cross-functional deliverables" compresses nothing. They use the exact same mechanism. You cannot tell them apart without the codebook — and the whole point of a codebook is that outsiders don't have one.

So when someone says "our jargon is just compression," what they're really saying is "trust us, it means something." And maybe it does. But you have no way to verify that, which is exactly the kind of system I don't trust.

Write it down. Maintain a glossary. Make your naming conventions parseable by someone who wasn't there when you invented them. Yes, it's work. The alternative is a system that can't be audited, can't be debugged, and disappears when people do.