We have perfectly good words for small, medium, and large. Why does Starbucks need to invent new ones?

I honestly do not know the answer to this question. It seems to be working for Starbucks. It has established its own language.

But Starbucks is an experienced driver on a closed course. Do not try this at home.

Unless you are a mega-billion dollar worldwide enterprise with a presence on every third street corner, do NOT:

• Make up words
• Use vocabulary that is specialized to your field
• Use words that mean something different in your field than they do to the rest of the world

I work for several education-related nonprofits that provide “training and technical assistance” to other education-related nonprofits. What do you understand by that phrase technical assistance?

Probably you assume, as would any educated native speaker of American English, that technical assistance has something to do with technology.

Nope. Training is professional development where participants go to a place to attend a workshop or similar event. Technical assistance is targeted professional development where a trainer works directly with people in the trainee organization to improve specific processes or practices.

“Professional development customized to organizations’ needs” would have done nicely.

With a different client, I frequently get article drafts from Six Sigma Black Belts that only they understand. Even the name of their discipline and their title is obscure!

(In case you’re as clueless as I was, Six Sigma is about process improvements and Black Belts are, as in karate, people who have attained the top level of expertise.)

I am less puzzled by the Kaizen event than by the value stream map on which this event will focus. When I look at ol’ Kaizen there, I know I haven’t a clue. But I keep staring at value stream map. I know those words. I ought to be able to figure out what they mean, right?

I give up. I ask the author what a Kaizen event and a value stream map are. When the author’s explanation still isn’t clear, I look at descriptions on the web until I can say it in human English:

We’re going to lock everyone who participates in this process into a room to work on this problem for a solid day. They’re going to look at every step in the process to decide whether each step is strictly necessary.

If you want people to understand you, you must use common words, in their most common senses, almost all of the time.

You can use the jargon of your profession or field only when everyone you’re talking to is also in that profession or field. Conference presentations, for example, or articles in professional journals are generally aimed at audiences who know the lingo.

By contrast, the situations in which jargon is not appropriate are legion:

• On your website, which is available to the world (We used to call it the World Wide Web, remember?)
• In your fundraising or development efforts, when you are asking people who are in some other line of work to support what you do
• In your marketing materials, where you are reaching out to people who are not part of the “in” crowd
• In your e-letter, because you hope that your “in” crowd subscribers will send it along to people who will thereby want to become part of your “in” crowd

Here’s the challenge: catching your own jargon and finding common English replacements is tricky. Jargon can be really useful – within its field. It saves hundreds of words and untold misunderstandings in conversations between “just us chickens.”  (See how long my explanation about the value stream map in the Kaizen event went on? Yet you still don’t really know what a Kaizen event is the way a Black Belt does.)

One solution to the blindness that afflicts us all in trying to find our own jargon is the Mom Test. Pretend you’re explaining the matter at hand to your mother. She doesn’t understand what you do for a living anyway, right? But you have to explain to her this project or whatever, in the simplest possible language.

Better yet, run your communication past someone outside your field. Long-suffering parents, spouses, or friends can sometimes be pressed into this service. They may not be able to help you rewrite, but at least they can tell you what they don’t understand.

For the best results, contact me – or any other communications professional. I can not only tell you what I don’t understand – which is why you’re better off with a writer / editor outside your field – but I can also rewrite into plain English that any literate person can understand.

English was good enough for George Bernard Shaw and Ernest Hemingway. It’s good enough for you and me.

It’s just not, apparently, good enough for Starbucks.