Familiar Boot: The Hidden Cost of In-Group Language
Hari reflects on a childhood memory and wonders why office speak is like a game of Chinese whispers, where everyone's pretending they understood the first time…
I've worked with dozens of organisations over the years, and I'll tell you something I see constantly: people nodding along in meetings, looking engaged and professional, whilst having absolutely no idea what half the abbreviations and references actually mean.
They're brilliant people. They're doing brilliant work. But they've learnt that admitting you don't know something can make you look foolish, so they work it out from context and hope for the best. And sometimes that works. But sometimes it doesn't.
The Familiar Boot Effect
When I was a kid, my dad liked to pretend he could speak French. When he wanted us to shut up at dinner, he'd say "Ferme ta bouche" – close your mouth. One of my stepbrothers, about seven or eight at the time, misheard it as "familiar boot."
I don't know. Why do I have to familiar boot?
From that point onwards, whenever anybody in the family wanted anybody else to shut up, we didn't say "Ferme ta bouche," we said "familiar boot." Thirty years later, we're still making the same joke.
That's in-group language. It's wonderful if you're in the group. It's completely excluding if you're not.
When I brought my husband home for the first time to meet the family and they're saying "familiar boot" to each other over Sunday lunch, it gets a bit confusing.
In-group language is great if you are in the group and you know the jokes and you know the references and you get the shortcuts. When you're not in the group, you can be excluded, and that can feel horrible. You can see that other people understand things and they're talking about things that you don't get.
The DPO Mystery
I was literally on a call this morning when someone said, "We met with the DPO and we learnt this."
I could see two or three people nodding and two or three people looking confused. What's a DPO? Is this someone's name? What's going on?
It was the Data Protection Officer.
In that case, that's an abbreviation. It's more social-technical language. But there's also technical language which comes from having people who are deep in the details of a particular system or way of working, who then have to be able to explain it to somebody who isn't deep in the details. And that can be really difficult.
Abbreviations, shortcuts – all of these are different forms of technical language. Even API, which we talked about in my previous article – I've been using and talking about APIs for years. I didn't know what API stood for until someone told me it was Application Programming Interface. I know what it means, roughly, but I spent a huge amount of my time not knowing the full term.
The Notebook Test
I spent a huge amount of my career working with various different consultancies, and I was often sent into companies for six months or a year to help out on a particular project. Every time I started one of these projects, I would buy myself a nice new notebook. Love a new notebook. Big notebook fan, me.
I'd be in the meeting taking my notes, but people would be using language that I didn't know. Every time there was a reference, an abbreviation, or a name that I didn't know, I would write it on the back page of my notebook. Then I would go for coffee with somebody later and I'd say, "OK, what does this mean? What's this one?"
In five years of doing that, I never had a single notebook where I got an explanation for every single thing I'd written at the back.
I never got an explanation for certain things that I'd heard people using in meetings the time before. People like to fit in, and people are very good at working out roughly what things mean from context. But sometimes that means we miss the detail, and we can actually make it harder for people to bring this through.
The MVP Problem
Take MVP. In agile development, that's Minimum Viable Product. Anybody working in complicated project delivery would know that. But in America, it also means Most Valuable Player.
If I say "we're really concerned about our MVPs," do I mean valuable team members or the thing we're building?
When it comes to abbreviations like this, it's always worth saying it in full. So I might say, "I'm really concerned about our Minimum Viable Product, that's our MVP," just having that right at the beginning of a conversation. You don't have to say it every single time, but when you're talking to new people, you want to make sure that they understand.
The CBT Catastrophe
I had this great one where I was talking to somebody about CBT. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, right?
But have you heard of CBD? The cannabis-based derivative, the oil?
I was in a meeting room once where someone was talking about the benefits of CBT and somebody else thought they were talking about the benefits of CBD. That meeting went slightly off the rails because it was a wellbeing meeting and somebody else was going, "We can't give all of our staff CBT! What will that do to their productivity?"
I'm sitting there going, "We can't give them therapy? I mean, that might actually make them more productive." She thought we were saying we had to give them cannabis.
You can see that abbreviations can lead to miscommunications, and we want as much as possible to be able to be clear in our language.
The Jargon Paradox
Here's something interesting: when they've actually looked into studies of people using an awful lot of jargon, they've found that people who don't know what they're talking about use more jargon than people who do know what they're talking about.
People who feel insecure about topics they're talking about tend to use more jargon than people who feel confident about the topics they're talking about.
I remember at university, there was a professor who went through and went after university students that used what he called ten-pound words and overly flowery language. People who were trying to write essays in a very pompous tone – that was all a sign of trying too hard, that we didn't really know what we were saying.
Some of the most confident people I've ever worked with were the people who, in the middle of a meeting or presentation, would say, "Stop. Could you please explain what this abbreviation means? Because I haven't heard it before."
Rather than just nodding and smiling, they had the confidence to say, "Sorry, I just need to confirm – what does that mean?" And sometimes we need to do that because there can be multiple things that it means.
Breaking Down the Barriers
When you can avoid jargon, avoid jargon. When you're delivering something with in-group language, keep an eye to see who looks a bit confused. As much as possible, embrace plain language.
Plain language is where we say things simply. It is a favour to anybody who's listening.
I'm not always brilliant at this. I fall into slang and abbreviations and jargon. We all do sometimes. But I am always trying to say things in the simplest possible way that I can, because that makes it easier for people to learn from me.
The In-Group Trap
If you were to reflect on your own organisation, no doubt teams cross generation gaps, and unfamiliar language keeps groups separate and siloed. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Ensuring that the language and words your people use are as inclusive and easy to understand as possible is crucial for effective communication. We need to build empathy and actively consider our audience – how do we speak to them in a way that they will best understand?
While in-group language is great if you're a member of the team, outsiders and new arrivals are often completely confused. Just what exactly does "Gary it" mean? We need to build empathy and actively consider our audience.
It's worth identifying the language gaps your teams have to help them work around and through them. Sometimes you need to work across your organisation and run a language and communications audit to identify areas for improvement.
The Rule of Plain Language
When you're when you're delivering something, keep an eye to see who doesn't look like they understand, who looks a bit confused. As much as possible, embrace plain language.
There's a huge amount of value in being clear. If you can't explain what was needed on one side of A4, you didn't understand it yourself.
The most powerful communicators aren't the ones with the biggest vocabulary or the most impressive jargon. They're the ones who can make complex ideas accessible to everyone in the room – whether that person joined the team yesterday or ten years ago, whether they're technical or non-technical, whether they're in the in-group or not.
Because at the end of the day, communication only works when everyone actually understands what's being said. And that means being brave enough to ask "what does that mean?" when you don't know, and generous enough to explain clearly when you do.
What's your "familiar boot"? What in-group language is your team using that's excluding people without you even realising it?
Our Storytelling for Business training includes modules on audience awareness and inclusive communication – helping teams identify and eliminate the language barriers that hold them back. Learn more about our virtual Storytelling for Business course starting Friday, 5th June.
