At some point, you’ve probably had a conversation with someone during which you misunderstood each other. It’s an inevitable part of being human. Even when we’re speaking the same language, it’s possible to get confused about the meanings of and subtexts behind words.
This issue can become magnified in situations where people have different cultural contexts or don’t know each other well, or across workplaces and industries in which different terminology is used to mean the same or similar things, and vice versa. We’ve encountered all of this in our work at Extension Engine.
For insights into some of the challenges that words themselves can present and how we can overcome these challenges, we reached out to Senior Learning Experience Designer Lexie Bryan to put together a trilogy of posts about language and how we use it.
In this first post, Lexie discusses her background in linguistics, how it plays into her current work, what vocabulary inflation is, and how and why terms change within a field.