The Words We Won’t Learn
The child just learned the word. The adult decided not to. The child
There is a word for the ecosystem of bacteria living in your digestive system. It’s “gut biome.” You’ve probably heard it. You may have filed it away, or you may have done what I did for an embarrassingly long time — heard it, nodded, and quietly declined to retain it. Not because it wasn’t useful. Not because the concept wasn’t real. Just because some part of me had made a decision, below the level of conscious thought, that I had enough words already and this one could wait.
It couldn’t wait, as it turned out. None of the useful ones can.
Think about how you learned language as a child.
You didn’t evaluate. You didn’t weigh up whether a new word was worth the cognitive real estate. You didn’t say I already know four words for happy, do I really need ebullient? You just absorbed. The word arrived, and you took it in, and it became part of the furniture of your mind without any negotiation. Children are promiscuous word-adopters. They have no filter because they haven’t built one yet.
And then, somewhere in growing up, you built one.
This is not entirely a bad thing. The filter serves a purpose. It protects you from the barnacles — the words that exist purely to sound important, to signal membership of a club, to dress up an ordinary idea in expensive clothes. You know the ones. They arrive in meeting rooms and strategy documents and company-wide emails, and they mean less than the words they replaced. They sound like this:
“Going forward, let’s circle back on the learnings from this deep dive and socialise the findings with key stakeholders before we action the next steps.”
Every word in that sentence is doing less work than it appears to be doing. Going forward means nothing — when else would you go? Circle back means return. Learnings means lessons, a word that existed perfectly well before someone decided to verb the noun and noun it back again. Socialise means share. Action means do. Key stakeholders means the people who matter — and if you have to call them key stakeholders, something has already gone wrong.
Your brain is right to resist these. They are barnacles. They attach to the hull of real communication and slow everything down.
But sometimes the filter becomes indiscriminate. You stop evaluating whether a word is worth learning and start refusing on principle. The refusal stops being a considered response and becomes a habit. And the habit can harden, quietly, into a wall.
I spent most of my career in technology. Which means I spent most of my career being an early adopter — of tools, of systems, of ways of working that hadn’t quite settled yet. I was the person who figured out the new thing before the manual arrived. The person who trained the others. The person who, by the time the official rollout happened, had already been living in the new world for three months.
And yet.
My brain staged regular, vigorous protests against the vocabulary that came with it.
Agile. A word that meant something precise and useful in software development and then escaped into the wild and attached itself to everything until it meant almost nothing. I resisted it for years — not the concept, which was sensible, but the word, which had been worn smooth by overuse. Scrum. A project management framework that borrowed its name from rugby and seemed, for a long time, to be mainly a way of having more meetings about the meetings. Company culture. A real thing — genuinely real, genuinely important — that got picked up by HR departments everywhere and repeated so often and so emptily that my jaw tightened every time I heard it.
Early adopter. I particularly resisted this one, which in retrospect is funny, because I was one. I just didn’t want to be called it.
These weren’t barnacles, exactly. Not like the words I heard week after week in meeting rooms across my career:
“We need to leverage our core competencies to move the needle on this, drive alignment across the team, and ensure we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet.”
“This is a real opportunity to blue-sky think outside the box and ideate some disruptive solutions that will shift the paradigm for our customers going forward.”
“Let’s make sure we have full visibility across the workstream, keep all the balls in the air, and bring our A-game to the table so we can hit the ground running in Q3.”
These were real words attached to real concepts that had been handled so much, by so many people, in so many meetings, that the meaning had been rubbed off them. Leverage. Move the needle. Drive alignment. Singing from the same hymn sheet. Blue-sky thinking. Outside the box. Ideate — a word so unnecessary it makes me tired just typing it. Disruptive. Paradigm shift. Visibility across the workstream. Keep all the balls in the air. Bring our A-game. Hit the ground running.
My resistance wasn’t wrong. It was just — as it turned out — not the final word.
Because here’s what happened.
The technology kept arriving. The frameworks kept being adopted. The vocabulary kept becoming, despite my best efforts, the vocabulary. And at some point — I couldn’t tell you exactly when — I stopped resisting and started using. Not performing. Not ironically. Just using, because the words had stopped feeling like someone else’s and started feeling like tools.
And then I was standing in front of a screen on Microsoft Teams — itself a word I’d initially resisted, having spent years perfectly happily with whatever came before it — training dozens of people how to use the thing, saying agile and scrum and company culture out loud, without flinching. Using words like bandwidth to mean capacity, ecosystem to mean environment, robust to mean strong, granular to mean detailed. The words I’d spent years quietly refusing were coming out of my mouth with the ease of long familiarity.
Because that’s what happens when you finally let something in. It stops being a foreign object and becomes part of the furniture.
The drawer had made room, as it turns out it always does.
AI arrived with luggage.
Not just the technology — the vocabulary. A whole new set of words, arriving all at once, with no warning and no apology. Prompt. Hallucinate. Token. Large language model. Neural net. Fine-tuning. Inference. Each one a small demand on a brain that was already managing quite enough terminology, thank you.
I watched people I know hit that wall in real time. Not stupid people. Not incurious people. People who had spent decades building expertise in their own fields, managing their own complex vocabularies, and simply did not want to make room for another one. The resistance wasn’t about AI specifically. It was about the words. The jargon was the door, and the door felt heavy, and they decided not to open it.
I understand that feeling completely. I’ve spent most of my career having it. But I’ve also spent most of my career on the other side of it — being the person who eventually said the words, trained the people, stood in front of the screen and explained the thing to the room.
And I can tell you from experience: the words that matter are worth the resistance it takes to get to them. Not because learning them is easy, or because the vocabulary is always well-designed — hallucinate is a genuinely strange verb to apply to a computer, and I reserve the right to have feelings about it. But because the thing behind the door is worth opening the door for.
Some of the AI vocabulary is barnacles. There will be:
“AI-powered synergies that unlock value across your end-to-end digital transformation journey, enabling you to future-proof your organisation’s human capital bandwidth.”
Your rubbish detector is correct to flag that sentence. Every word of it deserves to be thrown back.
But some of it is Agile. Real concept, real utility, rough edges that smooth out with use. The kind of word that feels like someone else’s until the day it suddenly, quietly, becomes yours.
The child just learned the word.
She didn’t ask whether she needed it. She didn’t calculate the return on investment. She didn’t wonder what it said about her that she didn’t already know it. She just took it in, because words are interesting and the world is interesting and there was no cost to not knowing yet.
She had nothing to lose.
You do. That’s the real difference — and it’s worth being honest about it, because the story we tell ourselves is that we’re resisting the jargon, or resisting the overload, or resisting the rubbish. And sometimes we are. The rubbish detector is real and it’s useful and it has served you well.
But sometimes — not always, but sometimes — the thing you’re actually protecting isn’t your cognitive space. It’s your identity. The carefully constructed, hard-earned sense of yourself as someone who knows things. Who has done the work. Who is competent in a complex world and has the scars to prove it.
Every new vocabulary is a small ambush on that identity. It arrives and says: the world has moved on, and you don’t know the words yet. And the adult brain, which has spent decades building a self that knows things, hears that as a threat rather than an invitation.
So the wall goes up. Not because the words are bad — though some of them are — but because not knowing feels like losing ground you worked hard to take.
Here’s what I want to say to that person. Here’s what I want to say to the version of me that spent years grimacing at agile and scrum and company culture and prompt and large language model and every other word that arrived uninvited and demanded to be learned:
The ground you’re protecting isn’t going anywhere.
Knowing the new word doesn’t erase what you already know. It doesn’t make your expertise provisional or your experience irrelevant or your hard-won competence suddenly contingent. It adds. That’s all it does. The drawer is not full — it has never been full — and every word you’ve let in despite yourself has proved that.
The child wasn’t brave. She just hadn’t built the wall yet.
You have. And you get to choose what you do with it.
Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.