There is a version of English spoken in courtrooms, boardrooms, and academic journals. It is dense. It is expensive. And it is almost entirely unnecessary.
Consider the following sentence from a standard commercial lease agreement:
“The lessee hereby covenants and agrees to indemnify and hold harmless the lessor against any and all claims, demands, losses, and liabilities of whatsoever nature arising out of or in connection with the use and occupation of the demised premises.”
Translation into plain English: “The tenant agrees to cover any costs if something goes wrong in the rented space.”
Fourteen words instead of forty-six. No Latin. No “hereby.” No “demised premises.” The legal effect is identical. The cognitive cost is not.
This is not a rare example. It is the default mode of professional English. And it is a system designed—consciously or not—to exclude.
Every specialized field develops its own vocabulary. Medicine, law, finance, academia, technology, government. Each has thousands of terms that exist for one reason: to signal membership. If you know the words, you are inside the club. If you do not, you are outside. This is not communication. This is gatekeeping.
Start with medicine. A doctor tells a patient they have “idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura.” The patient hears a death sentence. The translation: “a low platelet count of unknown cause, usually harmless.” The first version requires seven years of medical training to decode. The second version can be understood by a teenager. Both describe the same condition. Only one describes it for the person who actually has it.
Move to law. The phrase “force majeure” appears in nearly every commercial contract. It is French for “superior force.” In plain English, it means “things outside anyone’s control.” Yet lawyers insist on the French version—not because it is more precise, but because it has survived centuries of legal precedent. The words are a historical insurance policy, not a communication tool. The client pays for the precedent. The client does not understand the word.
Move to business. The corporate memo that asks employees to “leverage synergies to move the needle on Q4 deliverables” is saying: “work together to improve this quarter’s results.” The first version is nineteen syllables. The second is nine. The first version is designed to sound strategic. The second version is designed to be understood. They are not the same goal.
Then there is academia. The social sciences have produced some of the most impenetrable prose in human history. A 1996 paper in a philosophy journal included the sentence: “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure.” No one outside the author’s immediate field can parse this. The sentence is grammatically valid. It is also an act of violence against the reader.
The cost is not abstract. When medical information is written at a reading level above what patients can understand, they skip medication. When legal contracts are unreadable, people sign away rights they do not know they are giving up. When government benefits forms are written in bureaucratic prose, eligible citizens fail to apply. Jargon does not just annoy—it harms.
The size of the problem is staggering. Studies of patient information leaflets in the United Kingdom found that over forty percent were written at a university reading level, while the average adult reading age in the country is between nine and eleven. The National Health Service now mandates that all patient communication be written for a reading age of nine to eleven. It took a government directive to say what should be obvious: write for the reader, not for the profession.
English does not need separate vocabularies for law, medicine, and business. It needs one vocabulary that works across all of them. Specialization should add clarity, not subtract it. If a term cannot be defined in words an average sixteen-year-old can understand, the term has failed its purpose.
A good professional vocabulary does not protect the profession. It serves the public. The test is simple: can a patient, a client, a customer, or a citizen read it and act on it? If not, the words are not working. And if the words are not working, they are noise. And noise, in English, is the enemy.
Our Recommendation: Every field should be required to define its core terms in words a sixteen-year-old can understand. If a term requires a second term to explain it, retire the first one. English is for everyone. Not just the people with the credentials.