I hate acronyms

And I say that as someone who used to use them constantly, which probably makes me a hypocrite but also, I think, makes me a useful witness. Because I know exactly what is happening when I reach for shorthand instead of the full phrase. It is not efficiency. It is comfort. The term is already loaded in my brain, already familiar, and unpacking it feels like extra effort I do not always bother to make. I am working on that. But first, let me tell you what prompted this.

I was in a meeting recently and started quietly counting acronyms. I got to eight in the first 10 minutes before I gave up, partly because I lost count and partly because I was too busy performing comprehension. You know the face. Nodding, making small sounds of agreement, hoping nobody asks you a direct question. I have sat in enough rooms to know I was not the only one doing it.

That performance is costing us more than we realise.

When insider language takes over a conversation, something measurable happens to participation. People who are unsure of the terminology pull back. They contribute less, ask fewer questions, and disengage in ways that can look like disinterest but are actually just confusion. Research on how language functions in group settings consistently shows that when people feel linguistically out of their depth, they stop taking up space. So the quiet meeting, the one where nobody pushed back, the one you walked away from thinking went smoothly? It is worth wondering whether it was quiet because people agreed, or because people were lost.

Inclusive language is something I care deeply about and advocate for actively, and I want to be honest that for a long time I thought of that through a fairly narrow lens. Inclusive language as representation, as respect, as making sure terminology reflects the full range of people in a conversation. All of that still matters enormously. But inclusion also means whether the actual words and phrases and abbreviations you use allow people to participate in the first place. A room can be diverse in every meaningful way and still be inaccessible if the language running through it functions as a members-only code.

That is what acronym culture does. It is not malicious, most of the time. Nobody sits down and thinks, "how can I make this harder to follow?" But the effect is the same. Compression without context builds a wall, and the people who most readily climb that wall are the ones who built it. Everyone else either already knew the terms, figures it out through context and educated guessing, or quietly decides this conversation is not really for them.

The efficiency argument for acronyms is not without merit, but it has a condition attached that almost nobody mentions: it only works when every person in the room is starting from the same place. In genuinely mixed rooms, and those are the rooms worth being in if you want decisions that actually hold up, that condition is almost never met. The time you think you are saving by shortening three words to three letters is often spent later, unpicking misunderstandings, realigning on what was actually agreed, or wondering why implementation looks nothing like the plan.

There is also something worth saying plainly about who benefits from keeping professional conversations dense and technical. It is not the people asking questions. It is not the newcomers trying to find their footing. The people who benefit from a culture where you are expected to already know the language are the people who wrote the dictionary. Complexity, even when it is accidental, protects the centre. And in business, the centre tends to be quite comfortable already.

None of this means we abandon specialist language entirely. Context matters, and there are absolutely conversations where shared technical shorthand makes things faster and clearer for everyone involved. The point is to know which room you are in. To notice when you are reaching for an acronym out of habit rather than necessity. To clock, even briefly, whether the person you are talking to just looked slightly uncertain and then quickly smoothed their face back to neutral.

I have committed to doing something small but hopefully meaningful when I am facilitating or presenting. I will make a list of every acronym that comes up and define it on the spot, every time, without making it a moment. Not a production, not an interruption, just a quiet habit that says: we are all catching up here, and that is completely fine. It slows the room down very slightly and includes the room considerably more. That trade-off seems obvious to me now, even if it took me longer than I would like to admit to get there.

The next time you are in a meeting, try counting. You might stop after ten minutes too. But the more useful question is not how many acronyms you spot. It is who stopped talking around the same time they started appearing.