My friend Simon is a designer. One of his favourite lines is “Great kerning will save the world”. Chances are if you’re an art director or a designer or, if like me, you work with art directors and designers every day, you’ll find this amusing because it references a whole bunch of things about the discipline, the passion and the perspectives of those committed to impeccably forged design.
If you’re not a designer, you probably didn’t even grin. That’s OK. It’s not your dialect.
Language is about so much more than communication and meaning. It is filled with ideas and references that to some extent reflect the worldviews of those who enjoy them. People preserve those tenets in all sorts of ways. Some they jargonise; others they culturalise or instinctualise.
The acronyms are the easy part, because they are immediately confusing and confronting but at least they’re visible. I think the hardest thing to understand about any new sector you’re trying to market to is the embedded meanings, the invisible language, what goes without saying.
