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Because language is not a perfect medium for the expression of thought, because one word can have many meanings and two or more words can have the same meaning, we saw how complicated was the relation between an author's vocabulary and his terminology. One word may represent several terms, and one term may be represented by several words.

Part of the Agile Manifesto mentions "Customer Collaboration". I fully support that notion that our work should involve close collaboration with the customer. However, to me, collaboration means speaking the language of the customer. And that language should extend to cover all the metrics and analytics that we use. Have you ever had to explain what a Story Point is to a customer? How about Velocity? If you do not like yourself very much, march into your CFO's office someday and try to explain what a Story Point is. However, I guarantee all of your stakeholders understand the concept of elapsed time. I guarantee they understand the concept of the total number of features to be delivered in a release. If we truly want to be Agile, we are going to have to adopt the language of our customers. To that end, we must choose words and concepts that they are comfortable with--not force them to learn a new, arbitrary, and unhelpful vocabulary.

Unlike in Europe, which has the Danube and the Rhine, this drawback has hindered contact and trade between regions - which in turn affected economic development, and hindered the formation of large trading regions. The continent's great rivers, the Niger, the Congo, the Zambezi, the Nile and others, don't connect and this disconnection has a human factor. Whereas huge areas of Russia, China and the USA speak a unifying language which helps trade, in Africa thousands of languages exist and no one culture emerged to dominate areas of similar size. Europe, on the other hand, was small enough to have a 'lingua franca' through which to communicate, and a landscape that encouraged interaction.

boring pseudo-controversies caused by misunderstandings. For example, never waste time arguing about "life," "intelligence," or "consciousness" before ensuring that you and your protagonist are using these words to mean the same thing!

Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

That applies to the language you use everywhere--in e-mail, packaging, interviews, blog posts, presentations, etc. Talk to customers the way you would to friends. Explain things as if you were sitting next to them. Avoid jargon or any sort of corporate-speak.

Korzybski, Alfred. 1879-1950 - Polish-American independent scholar who developed the field of general semantics. He argued that knowledge is limited by our physical and language capabilities.

People with an impoverished vocabulary live an impoverished emotional life; people with rich vocabularies have a multi-hued palette of colors with which to paint their experience, not only for others, but for themselves as well.

In 1770, Captain Cook's ship Endeavour ran aground on the coast of Queensland, Australia. While some of his men made repairs, Cook led an exploration party and met the aboriginal people. One of the sailors pointed to the animals that hopped around with their young riding in pouches, and asked an aborigine what they were called. The aborigine replied, 'Kanguru.' From then on Cook and his sailors referred to the animals by this word. It wasn't until later that they learned it meant 'What did you say?'

Two people can be using the same word, meaning different things, yet continue the conversation, which is fine for coffee, but not when making decisions, particularly policy decisions affecting others.