Five things wrong with 'language is compression'

I've been picking at this for a while. The whole "language is compression, expertise is dense encoding" thing. It's got problems and nobody seems to want to talk about them.

Gatekeeping. Every pidgin is an entrance exam and nobody calls it that. "Oh you just need to learn the terminology." Right. The terminology that was never written down, that changes based on who's talking, and that took years of floor time to absorb. When the senior operator retires the codebook walks out the door. That's not portable expertise. That's expertise that died.

Opacity. Corporate jargon uses the exact same mechanism as shop floor shorthand but compresses absolutely nothing. "Leverage cross-functional synergies to drive stakeholder alignment" — that sentence has the structure of dense encoding without any density whatsoever. And you can't tell the difference from outside. The format is amoral. It works equally well for signal and bullshit.

Babel. Every team compresses independently. Engineering has a language. Production has a different one. Purchasing has a third. They're all describing the same parts. None of them can read each other's spreadsheets. Management speaks a fourth language that isn't compression at all, it's just vague. Maximum local efficiency, zero global legibility. This is what you get when everyone optimizes their own encoding and nobody maintains a shared dictionary.

Fossilization. Shorthand hardens. What started as a convenient nickname becomes the only way anyone refers to the thing. The language stops encoding knowledge and starts constraining thought. You literally stop seeing what your vocabulary can't express. But sure, it's "efficient."

Power. Somebody named these patterns. Whoever picks the terms controls the frame. "Emergent" sounds alive and organic. "Specified" sounds dead and bureaucratic. Those aren't neutral descriptions. They're marketing. The vocabulary picks winners and losers and then pretends it was just describing reality.

None of these are edge cases. They're structural. And any framework that treats compression as inherently good without dealing with them is selling you half the story.