Slang and technical words, or techno-babble
As I wrote my recent article on the availability of Bitcoin Options, and encouraged people to explore that investment strategy. I was reminded of my difficulty learning to trade options 14 years ago. I also remember how half the battle of trying to understand an options trading strategy is both the “slang language” and the explanations of unfamiliar terms (to me) with other unfamiliar terms. I would read things and listen to audio recordings and frequently the speakers lecture was as difficult to understand as the babble or noise a baby makes when it’s learning to talk. I then invented a word for this, which I half jokingly call it Techno-Babble.
The problem with Techno-Babble
You are probably familiar with the Bible Story of the Tower of Babel, when everyone who spoke one language and could work together, suddenly spoke many different languages and couldn’t work together anymore.
I feel that one of the limiting issues for adoption of new ideas and technology is in explaining it to the end user or potential customer. People who study and immerse themselves in a subject become very knowledgeable and are sometimes very good at applying their understanding of what a technology can do to modern day processes. But their frequent short coming is that not only do they explain their new technology in terms used only by those well versed in that technology, but they define those terms with other terms known only to those well versed in that technology.
As an example I read a thread where someone explained distributed consensus using terms like decentralized nodes, and finished his description saying these nodes were immutable and infinitely scalable. I laughed so hard I almost fell off my chair :)
My Options Education
I started my options education with a book by a Legendary Options Trader. His book was considered the best book in the world on options. I hope you can imagine or feel the disappointment I felt as I read it and beyond the first chapters of it I understood very little of what he wrote. I honestly thought I was to dumb to trade options. But my friends assured me, it was not me, it was the author. And while I appreciated their attempts to protect my ego, I couldn’t help but feel my education had somehow been inadequate, as how could I not know so many words! It was very belittling.
And then an epiphany
One day, while I was reading one of those “Options trading for Dummies” books, the purchase of which was a painful admission on my part by the way. I had an “epiphany”. The author was a trader of stocks options, but on the surface he appeared ill-suited to the task, as he admitted to being an English major. My first thought upon reading his background before reading any of the book was that he would not be my first choice of an options trading instructor. But I was in a BookStore, a rather luxurious occasion for me, enjoying the look and feel of new books. So even though I was not feeling to good about the authors credentials, I decided to read a few chapters anyway.
It was great
I read a few chapters and really enjoyed it, and started thinking that “oh my goodness” this guy’s an options education genius. I suddenly understood clearly concepts I had been having difficulty understanding before reading this book. It was then I realized that this author was in the habit of explaining every concept in common English words. It was this constant explanation of Options terminology or perhaps I should say the translation of the new options vocabulary terms into common English words that made his book so good.
Plus he never used options slang, only proper and precise terms. As a bonus he would mention how options traders sometimes use a slang term instead of the correct term, and how options traders misuse certain terms because they are close in meaning, but actually different, and why this was confusing. used to explain the strategies that made his book so good. I was suddenly enlightened and understood. I was having trouble learning options trading because of the idioms or slang.
Conclusion
If we wish to bring new people into our project, we need to be very aware of the words and terms we use to explain things. We need to communicate using first the language of the technology followed by common non-technical language. As a metaphor, We can’t complain about nobody joining our ranks and sharing our enthusiasm if we speak only in Greek and define our Terms with other Greek words. Our audience will be limited to Greeks and other enterprising nationals who speak Greek.
The end of Techno-Babel must begin with us.
✍️ written by Shortsegments