Learning a Foreign Language on the Job
A few years ago, I asked my wife, Erin, a question about investing. She started her answer with, “During the GFC….”
I asked, “What does ‘GFC’ mean?”
She was shocked that I didn’t know it referred to the Great Financial Crisis. I was surprised that she thought everyone knew that acronym. I think of myself as an above-average consumer of news, but had somehow missed that “the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009” had become an event deserving of a capitalized name, and that name had become known enough to be reliably shortened to GFC—a translation on a translation.
Moreover, I wondered how the shortening, which I assume was initially used in writing, became acceptable in speech. I suspect it occurred because the people who used it forgot that there were two translations involved, and because they were talking regularly with others in the know, they forgot that it was jargon.
Of course, that’s a natural dynamic in groups, and I’ve done it myself. For example, my mother-in-law uses the phrase “boochies” to refer to a person’s backside. If she were watching an aging athlete on TV, she might comment, “He’s too old, child. He needs to take his boochies home and retire.” But after hearing her and my wife use the term over the years, I forgot it was family-specific slang. When I used it with a friend, they were just as confused as when I heard GFC.
I was thinking about those dynamics while reflecting on the first week and a half at my new job. Like most organizations, we’ve got a group-specific language, though it’s less about novel phrases than the prolific use of acronyms—school names, departments, roles, events, and even individuals. That’s not a criticism—it’s just the inevitable shorthand that groups create to ease communication. However, it also makes reading documents almost like reading a foreign language. You can pick up some of the words from context, but without the tribal knowledge needed to decode them, you can easily get confused.
For example, if you see someone’s initials in a document, you have to first recognize that it’s an individual, rather than a place or thing. Then, you’d have to know whose initials they are. Finally, until you meet everyone, you’d have to know each person’s role. But if you have all that knowledge, it’s easy to lose the fact that an acronym is an acronym or that the team’s jargon is jargon.
It’s even funnier when you realize that acronyms have meanings outside of the context. Imagine reading a memo about “TMI issues” and learning that it really refers to a Targeted Math Intervention. Or that a big push on student culture was KNOTB, without clarifying that it’s Kids Navigating Obstacles Through Belonging. Luckily, I haven’t seen any acronyms as egregious as those, but it’s totally plausible, which is exactly the problem.
Admittedly, some of my beef with acronyms stems from being a curmudgeonly old guy, but the confusion they can cause is real. For example, I’m working on a project plan that largely uses last year's template. It’s a great start, except that people changed roles, making it unclear whether they’re responsible for the task under their old or new role. (I’m fixing this, in part, by adding titles to the plan.)
Moreover, I reread an HR onboarding document that used many acronyms anyone with more than two weeks of experience would recognize. Except that if it’s your first job, you might not know what COB, HSA, or W-2 are—all of which are critical!
If I were the ruler of the world, I’d ban all acronyms to reduce this confusion, especially in formal documents. Fortunately, there’s an easy button with AI—we can tell our favorite AI tools, “Identify any jargon or unexplained acronyms in this document, and make suggestions to clarify them.” While it’s increasingly hard for us to recognize the unique language of our organizations, we can ensure that we don't leave readers to decode what we've forgotten needs decoding.