Now You're Speaking My Language

We often find ourselves living within our own little worlds online.  Sectioned off communities contained by invisible walls of obscurity.  These walls divide us by knowledge, those with it pass through the walls and those without either bounce right off without realising or they meet those walls as barriers to entry.

Some of us stumble into these worlds unknowingly, and take up residence.  Over time we integrate more and we learn more about the community as a whole and it begins to change us.  At first those changes are subtle, little things like a new vocabulary of words creep into our lives.  Surrounded by people within the same community we exist blissfully unaware of just how far down the rabbit hole we are following.  In time we are full blown residents of wonderland speaking it's language freely at an almost native level.  It is not until we meet Alice, someone who is not resident that we actually realise how divorced our world has become from everyone else.

We are sometimes on the other side of this scenario and find ourselves in Alice's shoes.  Today I stumbled across a video on youtube, a review for a product and I watched about 1 minute of the video because I saw the title and had no idea what it was so thought "hmm what's that?" - after 1 minute I was still sitting scratching my head as nothing they had said made any sense to me.  It was all plain English and they spoke in words I had heard before but clearly they had some different meaning to what I have experienced.  So I googled the product and found their website and read through the description and still found myself scratching my head thinking "What's it actually for, what does it do?" - I realised I was Alice and this was wonderland.  I thought to myself how muddied everything was and how no plain English explanations existed, even googling terms through up definitions for the meanings I had knew and things that became increasingly far fetched as possible explanations.

I left the page and went about my normal routine resigned to defeat over what it was I had actually seen.  The thought did play on my mind and it made me realise there are many communities online that I have been part of at one point or another, from sexuality, politics, social issues, through to sciences, computing, programming, and design among others.  The ubiquitous use of jargon that I have long since needed to google definitions for, and how much dialogue I used that would actually make sense to someone who had never ventured into those areas before became apparent to me.  It is very easy to forget what knowledge is common and what is specialist.  In many ways although we still speak English, we do speak another language.  A subset of English, a dialect if you will. 

My question of the day is simply how many specialist dialects like this do you speak?  Can you have entire conversations with people without an outsider understanding a single word?