Invisible Jargon: When Familiar Words Fail

The Up-Goer Five challenge frames communication barriers as a problem of language. But just as some people “get” XKCD and others do not, the deeper barrier is not vocabulary itself, but perception. How we write and speak reflects how we see the world, and those perceptions are shaped by exposure and lived experience. This is the deeper issue of climate literacy.
 
The common failure in science communication is that words appear to be shared but are not. Scientists can assume that meanings travel with words, whereas in practice audiences bring their own meanings. The result is invisible jargon: misunderstandings are created not by unfamiliar terms but by familiar words used in unfamiliar ways. Adapting language to an audience is therefore necessary but insufficient. Effective communication also depends on whether we can see the issue as the audience sees it, and then use words in the way they are normally used and understood within that context. This sounds obvious, which is exactly why it matters.
 
The problem is not only that audiences do not understand our words, but that they understand them differently. This leads to the familiar frustration of “We used plain language, why didn’t it work?”, and represents the barrier of false familiarity.
 
In this presentation, we draw on experiences and ongoing discussions within WCRP RIfS (https://www.wcrp-rifs.org) to revisit the concept of climate literacy by explicitly linking words with perception, and show how we are exploring ways to move climate communication toward genuinely shared understanding.