The fluorescent light above my desk hums at a frequency that feels like a needle behind my left eye, a steady, rhythmic buzzing that seems to synchronize with the dull ache in my temples. I am staring at a memo that contains 41 distinct acronyms, none of which appear to have a physical correlate in the real world. My hand is cramped from gripping the pen too hard, a reflex from years of guarding the only 11 functional staplers in a facility that houses 1201 people. In the prison library, clarity isn’t just a stylistic choice; it is a safety measure. If I tell a man in a blue jumpsuit that we are ‘leveraging archival synergies to optimize resource allocation,’ he is going to think I’m trying to screw him out of his law library time. He wants to know if the books are on the shelf. He wants the truth, unvarnished and reachable.

The consultant blinked, his internal processor whirring as he looked for a way to re-complicate the answer. He couldn’t just say ‘yes.’ To say ‘yes’ would be to admit that we had spent 61 minutes and several thousand dollars discussing a task that takes 11 seconds to execute. He had to keep the fog thick. He had to maintain the barrier. This is the fundamental truth I’ve realized after 21 years of managing books for people who have nothing but time to think: jargon is not a sign of intelligence. It is a defense mechanism. It is a fortress built of words designed to keep the uninitiated out and to keep the speaker from ever having to be held accountable for a concrete result.

I fell into a Wikipedia rabbit hole last night-started with the Great Vowel Shift and ended up somewhere deep in the history of ‘Asemic writing,’ which is basically text that looks like writing but has no semantic content. It’s beautiful in an artistic sense, but it’s terrifying when it becomes the standard operating procedure for a multi-million dollar corporation. We are living in an era of corporate asemic writing. We produce documents that are hundreds of pages long, filled with ‘deliverables’ and ‘asymptotic growth projections,’ yet they communicate nothing. When language becomes imprecise, accountability becomes impossible. You can’t fail to ‘operationalize a paradigm shift’ because nobody actually knows what that looks like. You can, however, fail to change a font. You can fail to fix a leaky pipe. You can fail to deliver a book to a cell on time.

A culture of jargon is a culture that fears the mirror. If we use simple words, we might have to acknowledge that our ideas are mediocre. We might have to admit that we don’t have a plan. By cloaking our uncertainty in the weight of artificial complexity, we grant ourselves a temporary immunity from criticism. Who wants to be the person in the meeting who admits they don’t know what ‘hyper-local synergistic integration’ means? Most people would rather pretend to understand a lie than admit to being confused by it. It’s a collective hallucination that we all agree to participate in to save face.

In the library, I see this play out in a different way. New inmates often arrive using the slang of their specific streets, a private language that grants them status within their 11-block radius. But when they want to file an appeal, they suddenly try to adopt what they think is ‘legal-speak.’ They write petitions filled with ‘whereas’ and ‘heretofore’ and ‘the aforementioned party of the first part,’ thinking that the complexity of the words will somehow force the judge to listen. I have to sit them down and explain that the judge doesn’t want to see a 101-page imitation of a 19th-century textbook. The judge wants to know what right was violated and what the evidence is. The jargon is a barrier to their freedom, not a path toward it. Complexity is often just a mask for insecurity.

This obsession with complexity has bled into every industry, even those that should be grounded in the most basic of human needs: comfort and safety. Take the world of home infrastructure and climate control. It’s an industry that should be about the simple, honest goal of keeping a human being warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Yet, it is often buried under a mountain of technical gatekeeping. You see brochures filled with proprietary acronyms and engineering jargon that seems designed to make the average homeowner feel like they need a PhD in thermodynamics just to buy an air conditioner. It’s the same smokescreen. In my world, you don’t need a degree in fluid dynamics to understand why your room is hot; you need a solution that speaks your language, which is exactly why companies like

minisplitsforless

are such a breath of fresh air in an industry often choked by technical gatekeeping. They realize that the goal isn’t to sound smart; the goal is to solve the problem.

I’ve spent 41 minutes today thinking about the word ‘leverage.’ It’s a perfectly good word in the context of physics. It’s about using a fixed point to move a heavy object. But in the corporate world, it’s a ghost word. It’s a word people use when they want to sound like they are doing something powerful without actually moving anything. We ‘leverage relationships,’ we ‘leverage data,’ we ‘leverage synergies.’ If I tried to leverage a shelf in the library, I’d end up with a pile of books on my toes. There is a physical reality to words that we have completely abandoned in favor of these high-altitude abstractions.

I remember reading about the ‘Sokal Affair’-a physicist named Alan Sokal who submitted a completely nonsensical paper to a prestigious cultural studies journal. He filled it with all the right jargon, all the fashionable buzzwords of the time, and they published it because it sounded ‘intellectual.’ He later revealed it was a hoax, a deliberate attempt to show that if you use enough big words, people will assume you have something important to say, even if you are literally talking about nothing. We are currently living in a perpetual Sokal Affair. We are being governed, managed, and marketed to by people who are essentially speaking in tongues, hoping we won’t notice the lack of substance behind the noise.

I once tried to explain this to a visiting administrator who was upset that I hadn’t ‘digitally cross-referenced the cataloging metadata’ for the new donations. I told her I had written the titles in the big blue book so people could find them. She looked at me like I had just admitted to eating the pages. To her, the blue book was an embarrassment because it was simple. It was transparent. It didn’t require a login or a 51-page manual. But here’s the thing: in the 21 years I’ve been here, the blue book has never crashed. It has never had a ‘synchronization error.’ It has never failed to tell a man where he can find a copy of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo.’

There is a specific kind of arrogance in thinking that making something easy to understand is a sign of weakness. On the contrary, it takes far more effort to be clear than it does to be complicated. It takes 11 times more energy to distill a complex idea into a simple sentence than it does to let it wander through a maze of subordinate clauses and technical filler. Clarity requires that you actually understand the subject matter. You cannot simplify what you do not comprehend. This is why the consultant at the meeting was so defensive when asked about the font. He didn’t understand the strategy well enough to explain it in plain English. The jargon was his hiding place.

I think back to that Wikipedia rabbit hole, to the Asemic writing that carries no meaning. It’s a haunting metaphor for where we’re headed. If we continue to reward people for sounding smart rather than being useful, we will eventually reach a point where our entire civilization is just a collection of very impressive-sounding people standing in very expensive rooms, talking to each other in a language that means absolutely nothing. We will have ‘optimized’ our communication right into a state of total silence.

That is the real cost of this linguistic gatekeeping. It’s not just annoying in boardrooms; it’s dehumanizing in the real world. It separates us into those who hold the ‘secret knowledge’ and those who are forced to beg for a translation. It creates a hierarchy based on the ability to navigate artificial complexity rather than the ability to provide value. It’s a game played by people who are more interested in their own status than in the well-being of the people they are supposed to be serving.

I’m going to go back to my desk now. I’m going to take that memo with the 41 acronyms and I’m going to throw it in the trash. Then, I’m going to go to the blue book and I’m going to write down the names of the 11 new books we got today. I’ll write them clearly, in black ink, so that anyone who walks in here-no matter where they came from or what they’ve done-can see exactly what we have and where it is. No leverage. No synergies. Just books on shelves. If that makes me look like I’m not ‘operationalizing my core competencies,’ I can live with that. I’d rather be understood by a man in a jumpsuit than admired by a man in a vest who can’t even tell me what font we’re using.