The Words Between Us

A chef tastes differently. Not better. Differently. With more words.

Where most of us get “good” or “I don’t know, it needs something,” a chef perceives acidity, salinity, the specific way fat coats the tongue before it dissolves. The moment before balance tips into excess. The precise thing that’s missing: too flat, too bright, too clean, named before the fix is known. And the naming is most of the fix.

This isn’t a superior palate. It’s a superior vocabulary.

The words don’t describe what’s being tasted. They create what’s possible to taste, they give it edges. Before you have the word “umami,” you experience a vague sense of depth, of savoriness, the thing that makes parmesan different from mozzarella without knowing what the difference is. After the word, you can isolate it, detect its absence, recognize it across foods that suddenly have something in common. The vocabulary makes the invisible visible. The undifferentiated, distinct.

Compression. “Umami” takes a thousand separate taste experiences and squeezes them into a single sound. The compression is lossy: the specific instances dissolve, only the pattern remains. But the loss is the point. By letting go of the particular, you can hold the general. The word carries less so the mind can carry more.

This is what jargon does at its best. What expertise is, underneath. A radiologist who sees “ground-glass opacities” isn’t showing off. She’s compressed years of seeing into a vocabulary that makes visible what would otherwise be noise. The term holds thousands of images she no longer needs to consciously remember. The word does the work of remembering so her mind can do the work of seeing.

The same thing is happening when an economist sees “deadweight loss” where you see a policy debate. When a chess grandmaster looks at a board that would overwhelm you and sees the Sicilian Defense, move fourteen, with a variation. The pattern has a name, and the name is a compression, and the compression is what lets the expert think at a level unavailable to someone still holding all the uncompressed particulars.

This is genuinely miraculous. The human mind has limits. Working memory holds perhaps four things at once. But vocabulary expands those limits. Every technical term is a way of chunking complexity into a single slot, freeing the other slots for more. The sommelier who can taste “minerality” and “tannin structure” and “volatile acidity” simultaneously isn’t thinking about three things. She’s thinking about one thing – this wine – with a vocabulary that’s already done the work of holding its components.

Vocabulary as cognitive exoskeleton. The species’ trick for building knowledge that exceeds what any single mind could hold. Every generation compresses what it learns into words, and the next generation inherits the compression, and builds on top of it, and compresses again. Science, technology, law, medicine: they’re all made of compressions layered on compressions, vocabulary built on vocabulary, each term holding what used to take a lifetime to understand.

The cost is distance. The word that compresses also abstracts. “Chronic kidney disease” holds more than any layperson could parse, but it holds it away from the body, away from the particular person, away from the fear. The compression that makes expertise possible also makes coldness possible. The radiologist who sees ground-glass opacities might miss, in that precise seeing, the person who’s terrified of what the seeing will find.

Compression makes you capable. It also makes you clinical.

But there’s another thing that happens to words. Not compression. Something closer to the opposite. Between people who’ve known each other long enough, vocabulary stops compressing. It starts accumulating.

“Fine.”

Between strangers, it’s empty. A placeholder. You ask how someone is, they say fine, you both move on. The word carries almost nothing because there’s no shared context to carry. It means only what the dictionary says it means.

But “fine” between two people who’ve known each other for years is different. Every use has been layered on every use before it. The first time “fine” was a lie. The first time it was an accusation, landing flat after an argument. The first time it was genuine reassurance, and it actually helped. Each instance still there, not abstracted away, not compressed into a pattern. Accumulated. Sedimented. The word getting heavier with each use rather than lighter.

So, when one person asks how the other is, and the answer is “fine,” and something shifts in the silence that follows: that’s not a dictionary definition being processed. That’s a history being read. Which “fine” is this? Which layer? What does it connect to in the past they share?

The dictionary can’t help. The dictionary knows nothing about it.

This is the axis I keep returning to. Compression versus accumulation. Two different things that happen to language over time.

Expert vocabulary compresses. It trades instances for patterns. It’s lossy: the specific moments dissolve into the general category, and that loss is what creates cognitive leverage. The word gets lighter so it can be lifted higher. That’s how you build knowledge that exceeds individual memory. That’s how the species bootstraps itself into capabilities no single generation could develop alone.

Intimate vocabulary accumulates. It keeps the instances. Every use adds weight rather than abstracting it away. The word gets heavier: denser with reference, richer with history, more capable of holding what no dictionary could define. That’s how individuals come to know each other in ways that can’t be transferred or explained. That’s how relationships become irreplaceable.

Compression makes you capable. Accumulation makes you known.

And these aren’t just two different processes. They’re two different wagers.

When you learn the vocabulary of a field, you’re trading thickness for reach. The word “inflation” compresses centuries of economic thought into three syllables. An economist can use it and be understood by other economists anywhere in the world, across languages, across cultures. The compression is what makes the communication possible. But the compression also strips out the texture: the specific panics, the particular bread lines, the faces of people watching prices rise. The word reaches further because it carries less.

When you build a vocabulary with a person, you’re trading reach for thickness. The word “fine” between lovers can’t travel. It means nothing to anyone else. But between them, it carries everything: every instance, every layer, every silence where the word was true and every silence where it wasn’t. The vocabulary reaches less because it carries more.

This is the wager of expertise: I will learn to speak in compressions, and I will be understood by strangers who share my field, and I will lose the ability to speak to people outside it without sounding cold or obscure.

This is the wager of intimacy: I will build a vocabulary with someone, and I will be understood by them in ways no stranger could grasp, and I will, at least in some capacity, lose the ability to be fully understood by anyone else.

Every serious relationship is making this second wager. Not just romantic relationships. The family with a word for the thing the youngest child does when tired: the specific gesture, the specific sound, named with a word that means nothing outside those walls. The friendship where a single raised eyebrow calls back fifteen years of private jokes. The working relationship where “that’s very interesting” has become, through repetition and context, a complete communication about what’s wrong and what should happen next, and where an “I agree” said in a specific way has come to mean anything but.

You’re building a private language. And the privacy is where the intimacy lives. The words that work only here, that have gathered their meaning only between you, that would be empty sounds to anyone listening in.

But this means every deposit into the private vocabulary is also a withdrawal from everywhere else. The more you’re understood here, the less fully you can be understood there. The more weight the words carry between you, the lighter they are anywhere else.

In groups. In organizations. The vocabulary becomes a kind of membership.

Every field, every company, every team develops its language. Some of it is compression: the technical terms, the jargon, the acronyms that let insiders communicate quickly. But some of it is accumulation. The phrases that have gathered meaning through shared experience. The words that carry the history of what the group has been through together.

A team that’s survived a crisis together will have words for it. Not technical words. Thick words. “Like the 2022 situation” might mean nothing to a new hire and everything to the people who lived through it. The phrase is heavy with what happened, with how it felt, with who did what under pressure. It’s accumulated meaning the way intimate vocabulary accumulates meaning. And it does the same work: it marks who’s inside and who’s outside. Who shares the history and who doesn’t.

This is why organizations are so hard to enter, and why onboarding never quite works the way HR imagines it will. Not because the technical vocabulary is difficult to learn: that can be compressed, transferred, taught. But because the thick vocabulary can’t be taught. It can only be accumulated. The new person can learn what “synergy” means in the dictionary sense, but they can’t learn what it means when this particular CEO says it in this particular tone in this particular meeting. That meaning is sediment. It built up over years of use, in specific contexts, with specific consequences. You had to be there. There’s no shortcut.

And this is also why organizations become dysfunctional. The vocabulary can accumulate around the wrong things. Around avoidance. Around comfortable fictions. Around the things that can’t be said directly.

At Boeing, before the crashes, the vocabulary had thickened around euphemism. “Quality escapes” for defective parts. “Traveled work” for assembly done out of sequence. “Affordability” for cutting costs on safety. These weren’t just euphemisms in the dictionary sense: polite words for impolite things. They were accumulated euphemisms. They’d been used so many times, in so many meetings, by so many people, that they’d gathered the weight of normalcy. They felt like how you talked. The direct statement – “defective parts are reaching the assembly line” – wasn’t prohibited. It had just become unnatural. The vocabulary had accumulated around the avoidance until the avoidance was structural. Until saying the simple thing simply would have felt like a breach of etiquette. Until the language itself had become a way of not-knowing.

Then the euphemisms met reality: 346 people died. Somewhere in the wreckage was a vocabulary that had made it possible to build the thing that killed them without ever having to say clearly what was being risked.

You can feel when an organization’s vocabulary has gone wrong. Not by the presence of jargon: jargon is just compression, and compression is often useful. By the thickness in the wrong places. The words that carry too much weight around the things that should be said simply. The words that hold the shared understanding of what is not to be said alongside the shared reality that it does in fact exist. The accumulated permission to not-see.

If you want to know where an institution is hiding from itself, listen for the words that have gotten heavy. The ones that seem to mean one thing and carry another. The places where the vocabulary has thickened around absence. The fix is usually boring: say the thing directly, once, and watch who flinches.

So vocabulary is a wager, whether you’re aware of it or not.

In expertise, you’re wagering that compression will give you capability worth the distance it creates. Sometimes you’re right. The surgeon who can see “complex regional pain syndrome” instead of just a suffering patient can treat the syndrome. The distance is a tool.

In relationships, you’re wagering that accumulation will give you connection worth the privacy it creates. Sometimes you’re right. The family that can communicate in a glance has something no amount of explicit speech could replicate. The privacy is a shelter.

In organizations, you’re wagering that shared vocabulary will give you coordination worth the insularity it creates. Sometimes you’re right. The team that speaks in shorthand can move faster than one that has to explain everything. Sometimes you’re catastrophically wrong. The organization that speaks in euphemisms can hide from itself until the hiding kills people.

The wager is always the same shape: you’re trading reach for something else. Compression gives you reach across minds at the cost of thickness. Accumulation gives you thickness between minds at the cost of reach. Every vocabulary you build is a choice about what you’re willing to lose.

“I love you” at the end of every phone call.

In the beginning, it meant something. The first time: you remember where you were standing. The risk. The not-knowing. The words could have landed anywhere.

But after years of saying it, hundreds of calls, “I love you” becomes punctuation. You say it because not saying it would mean something. So you say it, and it means almost nothing. The ritual replaces the risk.

And then: the first call without it.

You hang up and something is wrong. Your body knows before your mind does. There’s a space where the words should be, and the space is loud with their absence. Suddenly every call that ended with “I love you” is present. The first one that doesn’t carries all the ones that did.

I keep thinking about what happens when the people who share a vocabulary are gone.

Any loss. A grandparent who dies, and with them dies the only person who would understand certain words the way you mean them. A friendship that fades, and the private jokes that made you both laugh now make only silence. A relationship that ends, and with it goes the one person who knew the map well enough to read your silences as fluently as your words. A job you leave, and the whole vocabulary of that place – the names for things, the references, the phrases that carried shared history – suddenly useless.

You’re still carrying the words. That’s what I didn’t understand for a long time. The vocabulary doesn’t disappear when the relationship ends. It fossilizes. The words harden into artifacts. They keep surfacing – a phrase, a reference, a way of saying something that belonged to a context that no longer exists. And there’s no one to hear them the way they were meant to be heard.

There are sentences in my head that have nowhere to go. Phrases that were funny once, in specific contexts, to specific people. The contexts are gone. The people are gone: some dead, some simply elsewhere, some lost to the slow drift of lives diverging. The sentences remain. They surface without warning, perfectly formed, waiting for listeners who no longer exist or who wouldn’t understand them anymore even if they did.

This is what loss is, I think. Not the absence of a person. The presence of a vocabulary you can no longer use. The weight you’re still carrying, alone now, from the language you built together.

And yet.

The wager is still worth making. That’s what I keep coming back to.

Yes, compression creates distance. But distance is sometimes what you need to see clearly. The word that abstracts is also the word that lets you think. The vocabulary of expertise, for all its coldness, is how the species builds on itself. Compression is how knowledge travels through time.

Yes, accumulation creates loss. Every vocabulary you build with someone is a vulnerability. It’s weight you’ll carry alone if they leave, if they die, if you simply drift apart. The words will fossilize. The private language will become a dead language, and you’ll be the only one who speaks it.

But accumulation is also how you come to be known. How you stop being a stranger to someone. How you build the thing between you that no one else can see or enter or understand. The thickness is the intimacy. The weight is the relationship. The private vocabulary is what you have, together, that you don’t have with anyone else.

I don’t know how to weigh these things against each other. The capability against the coldness. The connection against the vulnerability. I don’t think they can be weighed.

I only know that both processes are always happening. That language is always compressing and accumulating, making us capable and known and cold and vulnerable, all at once. That the words we use are always carrying more than their definitions: the compressions of centuries of thought, or the accumulations of years of use with specific people, or both, or neither.

And I know that the vocabulary between people is always a choice. Not a single choice but an ongoing one. Every conversation is a chance to deposit or withdraw. To add weight or let it dissipate. To build the private language further or let it thin.

The vocabulary between us is still developing.

That’s a vulnerability. Every word that thickens is a word that will weigh something if you go. Every shared reference is a fossil waiting to form.

But that’s the wager. That’s always been the wager.

The choice is not between safety and risk. The choice is between reach and thickness. And I want the words that carry more than they should. The language that doesn’t travel, that can’t be explained, that works only here. The vocabulary heavy with everything it’s held.

Ask me in twenty years. I’ll tell you in a word – or perhaps I won’t need to.