I recently had a friend ask about a social situation I’d been struggling with (something that has been happening a lot lately, and occupying a lot of my brainpower). “I have a readied action there,” I replied. I could have said, “I have an if/then/else set up to free up a mental desk.” Or, “I have a conditional response that I’ve thought through with the most likely scenarios, and that’s helped me have it take up less space in my thinking so I can get on with my day.” This kind of linguistic compression (yes, jargon) is interesting because it is a good illustration of how it is supposed to work, but also how they can often be swapped out, but do (and do not) still have extra information depending on the one chosen. The first of the three is obviously the most compressed, but also can carry the most connotations. It’s borrowing jargon from tabletop roleplaying games, and the surface-level meaning *can* be the same as the other examples. However, it’s also only something you do in those games during initiative, which means combat, or at least a tense or time-sensitive situation. It also means that’s what your character is *focused* on being prepared for. That’s *very* different than the uncompressed statement, which explicitly includes a motivation of wanting to not think about it. While it’s possible to compress that motivation as well with the second example — using the analogy of mental desks — so that it’s compressed overall, it still preserves that motivation. But the compression used for the TTRPG jargon just… doesn’t work like that, because that’s not how *readied actions* works in those games. You can still tack it on there, adding the “mental desks” analogy, but resolving that contradiction (by realizing it’s added by the connotations of the jargon) takes some extra mental work. [See also Staying Connected When A Loved One Is In The Hospital](https://www.ideatrash.net/2026/01/staying-connected-when-a-loved-one-is-in-the-hospital.html) That’s why it can be important to be able to switch out the ways that compress our language and change the lenses through which we describe it. My friend happened to already know that extra information — that I was doing so in order to “free up space” — but without that, it could have created confusion. Creating confusion (or even deliberate misrepresentation!) through those connotations can be done intentionally here by bad actors (1); this is also the way dogwhistles and emotional abuse hide in plain sight (2). The more ways you are able to change the lens you view a situation in, the more ways you can change the language you use to talk *and think* about the situation due to the way the language is compressed into jargon by that lens. Doing so reveals both the lossy nature of that compression, and artifacts introduced *by* that compression, which then changes behavior, and so on. Further, if one can shift contextual lenses on the fly, it allows for that kind of compression of information, while still preserving fidelity, regardless of context. And knowing their strengths and weaknesses gives you somewhere to start checking when there is a breakdown. Oh, and here’s a handy jargon bit that actually works well for understanding how these ways of looking at the world can help understand how it works through a model: hit points. Not just “hit points” alone. The realization that there are different *types* of damage, and they effect hit points differently, but they’re also *still hit points.* For example, there’s physical (blunt, slashing, magical, poison, etc), non-lethal, and psychic (magical, psychic, poison, etc). You can get more and more specific if it’s useful, but already it gives us a way to intuitively think of how “the body keeps the score” by realizing that psychic damage *lowers hit points*. Also it may help us focus our healing efforts by realizing that recovery efforts focused on the body (e.g. pills, self-medication) *help*, but aren’t a solution if someone is constantly taking psychic damage from the stress of their work environment and work relationships. Likewise, if someone is taking “psychic damage” due to a biochemical reason — say, ongoing lead poisoning — no amount of therapy is going to help. [See also Game And Give: Make A Donation, Get In My D&D Games For Free](https://www.ideatrash.net/2024/09/game-and-give-make-a-donation-get-in-my-dd-games-for-free.html) As with all of these, they are *lenses*, and ways to help understand the world. Just as this lens helps me understand and intuit the relationship between how emotional upset and the risk of a pain flare “works”, I’m not *actually* “taking psychic damage”. That’s the whole *point*. We used the lens of looking at how language is a lossy compression algorithm to reflect on what different lenses (and the ways they shape language) hide and reveal — and sometimes twist and manipulate — both information and meaning. And I shared a way of thinking about the relationship between physical and mental health through the jargon of tabletop roleplaying. Featured Image by [Katrina_S](https://pixabay.com/users/katrina_s-5565009/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=4664475) from [Pixabay](https://pixabay.com//?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=4664475) (1) Such as the phrasing of headlines and chiron blurbs (2) For example, I know more than one person who was groomed by an abuser to interpret “ok” or other mildly-positive and affirming phrases as *sarcastic disapproval*, instantly making it appear to the victim like most of the world was contstantly disapproving.