---
title: Avoiding Linguistic Misunderstandings
date: 2025-04-15
---
Recently, I’ve been noticing more linguistic misunderstandings and it prompted me to make changes to how I communicate in order to reduce the likelihood of such misunderstandings.

## Spell out initialisms
Unless 100% sure that the other party knows the same initialisms I do, I try to avoid them. I recently saw someone mention ‘SA’ in a group as referring to social anxiety, which led to some confusion as other participants thought about [other meanings](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/SA#English). If I’m talking to a web developer, then of course CSS and HTML don’t need to be spelled out.

I would also like to suggest that anybody that likes to use internet or generational slang to have their device expand these into their full forms rather than assuming that the other party has the same expansion in mind. I have noticed more difficulty communicating with younger people because they know a different set of initialisms than I do.

## Use generic names
It's a phone, not an iPhone. Whilst in this case it's not too unreasonable to assume that anyone reading this knows what an iPhone is, this isn't always true. Not everyone has the same knowledge of brands and products. Worse yet, not every region has the same brand or product names for the same products. In the United Kingdom, I grew up knowing what a Pritt Stick was, but most people in other regions will have no idea (it’s a stick of paper glue).

## Prefer layperson’s terms
I once worked in a company providing loans to businesses. Every month there was a company meeting to provide updates from the various departments and I would often hear terms like ‘deliquency’ or ‘origination’ that I am not used to. Since my work wasn’t particularly related to loans, I wasn’t familiar with the terms and would have to ask or look them up later. I think that it’s something that contributed to my feeling of not really being a part of the company and also meant that I wasn’t able to follow the content of the meetings very well, at least in the beginning.
I see a little irony in this, because I believe that people often prefer to adopt the specialised terms to try to signal being part of a group, but it can have the opposite effect on people who are not familiar with such terms.