Public Health Intersection

OMG it always amazes me how comfortable we become with the lexicons of our various professions. Lexicons are the vocabularies of languages and in this case I’m talking about vocabularies that are specific to a particular profession and while not always including abbreviations like the one starting this article are often useful to those in a particular profession to facilitate communication, they however can also be impediments to communication or at least cause confusion for those outside of that profession.

A case in point came in a recent e-mail from a colleague who noted that they had spoken at a NWA conference.

Now I was initially a bit confused as I thought that I had heard that NWA had merged with Delta, NWA being, of course, Northwest Airlines.

The conference my colleague spoke at was actually the National WIC Association conference. NWA also stands for the National Wrestling Alliance and the National Weather Association among others.

And what about WIC?

Most of us in public health would agree it stands for the Women, Infants and Children’s nutrition program, although it could also be the Women’s International Center, Women in Consulting, the Web Intelligence Consortium or the Windows Imaging Component or the WAN Interface Card.

And what about our friends in technology, does WAN only stand for Wide Area Network or could it be the World Association of Newspapers or World Architecture News or World Animal Net. I think you get the point.

I once worked with a state senator who stopped every presentation when the speaker used an acronym and made them describe what the acronym stood for.

People soon tailored their presentations to his committee to exclude acronyms, abbreviations, professional slang and the like.

It is important to pay attention to our audience and give them every opportunity to understand what we are trying to convey rather than trying to get by in shorthand.

It is also important to stop people when we don’t know what their acronyms or other jargon mean. How else will we learn and understand what they are saying.

We owe it to ourselves and those we interact with to say what we mean as completely and directly as we can, as communication should be about including not excluding.

Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation, I think you know what I mean.