The Dialects Around Us

February 9, 2025

Humor me, if you will, and think of something you've written lately. Maybe a form you've filled out or a particularly clever post on social media. Perhaps an essay you procrastinated on or a memo for some coworkers. Next, try describing what you wrote in a short phrase, no more than five words. Exercise as much or as little creativity as you want. Now, think of the context around that document: what led to you writing it, and what was the result afterward? Finally, come up with two other contexts where you might use the same phrase, based on that before and after. The more metaphorical, the better.

For me, the phrase is "a five-part story." When I started writing it, I felt frantic, an incoherent jumble of emotions and scenes playing in my head. I sat down and tried to tell the story of how I got to feeling that way, arbitrarily deciding it would be five parts long. I ended up diffusing myself after writing four of them. Describing the events in that way, the two alternative scenarios come to mind for me quickly. A five-part story could refer to when one has a complex problem that they're not sure how to even start explaining: "How did the date go?" "Oh, it's a five-part story." A five-part story could also refer to a process that's more complex than it needs to be, as in how I really diagnosed the problem in four parts. "Man, this application process is such a five-part story."

If you played along, you just constructed a new idiom.

idiom, noun.

A speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements, as in keep tabs on.

Dialect, a small tabletop game by Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalıoğlu, is all about this. In it, you and a few other players build your own little library from these pieces of language. A few hours later, you tear it down. I remember finding it remarkable how quickly we were able to do this; after just a few turns, we had already started saying sentences that would make no sense if you weren't in the group. If you spontaneously try using your idiom from the last section with others, you'll likely be met with a confused response as well.

Fonda Lee's Jade City is a book that does this extremely well. Over the course of the book, you'll find yourself getting increasingly familiar with the city's own idioms and vocabulary. Near the end, I had the same type of feeling as I had while playing Dialect. That I only could understand these sentences because I'd been primed on the local language. When the book switches to the perspective of outsiders to the country, you palpably feel the difference in how they speak. Some of the most impactful scenes in the book for me were built on these expressions that had been introduced only a chapter or two before.

It's easy to see this process in constructed environments like games and fantasy books. However, experiencing these environments also made me more aware of the dialects around us. Any linguist can tell you this process of idiomatization happens regularly, but it's easy to miss just how frequent and natural it really is.

It's an often-commented phenomenon that when one joins a new company, they need to become familiar with a bundle of technical terms and acronyms. A similar thing happens when joining a new group of hobbyists or friends; there's always some set of stories, media, or resources that one needs to become familiar with. As you spend time with others, you automatically build these shorthands for past experiences and inside jokes. This happens on your own too when learning a new topic and later trying to share it with others. It's a built-in part of how language works.

Even mathematics has this issue, despite often being characterized by a "Definition, Theorem, Proof" mindset, which emphasizes carefully defining all relevant terms. William P. Thurston discusses this extensively in his essay On Proof and Progress in Mathematics, where he challenges this characterization and emphasizes the role of clear communication. Look at how he describes the same problem.

Mathematics in some sense has a common language: a language of symbols, technical definitions, computations, and logic. This language efficiently conveys some, but not all, modes of mathematical thinking. Mathematicians learn to translate certain things almost unconsciously from one mental mode to the other, so that some statements quickly become clear. Different mathematicians study papers in different ways, but when I read a mathematical paper in a field in which I’m conversant, I concentrate on the thoughts that are between the lines. I might look over several paragraphs or strings of equations and think to myself “Oh yeah, they’re putting in enough rigamarole to carry such-and-such idea.” When the idea is clear, the formal setup is usually unnecessary and redundant—I often feel that I could write it out myself more easily than figuring out what the authors actually wrote. It’s like a new toaster that comes with a 16-page manual. If you already understand toasters and if the toaster looks like previous toasters you’ve encountered, you might just plug it in and see if it works, rather than first reading all the details in the manual.

People familiar with ways of doing things in a subfield recognize various patterns of statements or formulas as idioms or circumlocution for certain concepts or mental images. But to people not already familiar with what’s going on the same patterns are not very illuminating; they are often even misleading. The language is not alive except to those who use it.

Thurston calls these subfield-specific patterns "mental infrastructure," a term that I've found valuable to incorporate into my own vocabulary. Accounting for mental infrastructure turns out to be important when introducing ideas to others, and having a term for the phenomenon has helped me to identify cases where context or a definition may be necessary. It's why I'm a big fan of putting glossaries in my documents, and why it feels like a lot of my writing can boil down to "Here's what this term means." Knowing that this is a normal part of context switching means I'm less afraid to ask questions about terminology and less impatient when others ask the same of me. It's appropriate that Thurston recognizes value in those who are fluent in multiple subfields, able to bridge these communication gaps.

When writing for an audience, it can be instructive to ask how much of that audience is likely to understand some specific term. I can speak to the experience of trying to follow along with someone else's presentation without understanding some core terminology. I also know the experience of being the one giving that presentation. There's an art in finding good ways to communicate mental infrastructure. One of the first steps to improving at it is to recognize it exists and notice its appearance in the dialects around us.