One of my grandsons is studying to become a sommelier. He tells me that a sommelier is a person, usually employed by a restaurant, who suggests to customers “pairings” of specific wines with specific food dishes, supposedly to the enhancement of both. I say “supposedly” because he and I do not agree on some things that characterize his chosen specialty. Basically, I am a Occamist in most matters. KISS. “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” If it tastes good, that’s all I need to know. But he is intent on becoming a wine scholar, able to reel off at a moment’s notice a string of descriptors from his new oenophilic vocabulary to prove that he can predict my taste. The “legs” on my glass will reveal alcoholic content, the “nose” will remind me of a certain suburb in Provence, the “finish” will stay with me as aftertaste when the wine is gone. My favorite term is “palate”, which holds that different areas inside the mouth are preferentially sensitive to certain tastes (saltiness, sweetness, sourness, for example), which can be serially consulted by an expert. My grandson will expertly swish a newly discovered vintage into these separate areas to test its “dryness” or “fatness” or some other esoteric quality before rendering his opinion. My problem with that is that it has no scientific basis, despite several actual studies on actual people with actual taste buds. Experiment shows them to be identical. I have other adjectival quibbles, among them that wine, being liquid, cannot be either “dry” or “fat” since by definition a liquid is wet, and fat may describe the drinker but not the drink. He brushes this aside as inconsequential, like Trump confronted with a CNN fact. He is in pursuit of his Grade Three Level sommelier certificate, which (the school offering the certification promises) will add a zero to his potential annual earnings.

I remember a time during my college days when I was an aspiring oenophile (in addition to being an accomplished after school dishwasher at an East Side private school for silver-spoon boys). In search of sophistication I paid a private expert for evening classes that met once a week to discuss such things as “body”, “bouquet”, “balance”, and “terroir”, and test my burgeoning knowledge with bottles provided by our instructor (and paid for at the door to his apartment). The final meeting of the class featured a blind tasting of several wines, during which I undercut my aspirations by picking as my favorite what turned out to be the cheapest label on the table. However I defended my choice in a torrent of those specialized terms that so overwhelmed my fellow students that they ended up agreeing with me, much to the chagrin of our instructor. I cannot resist bringing up this youthful experience from time to time in discussions with my grandson. So far our family ties have nevertheless managed to stay firm.

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All this is just personal prelude to a discussion of the opposing roles of jargon and substance in the ever-widening fields of expertise that have burgeoned under the triple stimuli of specialized education institutions (culinary institutes that explore various ways of applying heat to food, computer schools that regard printouts of the help files of various apps and operating systems a curriculum, and less academically strict organizations that teach such wide-ranging skills as paddleboarding, rollerblading, and digital gaming) and governmental education subsidies of pseudo-academia promoted by legislators to cope with the shrinking private job market and their consequent desire to keep potential agitators off the streets and on the need by newly graduated children to find a reason to keep on living rent-free at home until the age of thirty.

There is no question but that it helps to keep carping critics at bay if you have the shield of an impenetrable private vocabulary. How can you criticize my sense of smell (“aroma, bouquet, nose”) or taste (“hint of almonds , lasting finish”) since I am the only one who can testify to them? If you don’t know what I am talking about, then we really can’t talk, and you will have to cede me the right to my opinion. If, as a critic, I have to hold an advanced degree from your alma mater to find the words to make myself understood in your world, is it really worth the trouble? Is a “vertical transportation associate” any more qualified than an elevator operator, if they both make $10 an hour, and are in any case due to be replaced next month by an automaton?

This protective strategy is not an innovation. The monks in the scriptoria guarded their knowledge of Latin, or at least of Latin spelling. The priests successfully used Latin for protection too, until their parishioners got nosy and started asking what they were really talking about. The Cockney merchants of East London, scrambling to evade the Queen’s tax collectors, used rhyming slang to communicate under the noses of the officials who couldn’t fathom such wonderful convoluted constructions as “aris” for buttocks (“ass”, a short form of arse, rhymes with “bottles and glass”, which in turn rhymes with Aristotle, which is then shortened to “aris”, as in “up yours”); or “use your loaf”, which rhymes with loaf of bread, which rhymes with head; so “use your loaf”. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

According to a young acquaintance of mine who has applied for a job with Starbuck’s, the system is still alive and well. She reports that the normal names for ingredients, such as “tea” or “coffee” or “milk” are forgone in today’s hip world. Instead, customers ask for a “red eye”, a “black eye”, a “skinny” or a “blonde”. Having learned these basic substitutions, post-grads going for their barista PhDs can proceed to higher levels with such things as a “frappuccino affagato”, or a “venti cappuchino, wet, with extra whip”. My young friend tells me she will have to attend a special boot camp and demonstrate mastery of this lingo before even being actually interviewed for an actual job involving actual ingredients.

I think that’s wonderful. Consider the boost to the ego of the “in” consumer, bellying up to the counter and ordering a “vente upside down caramel/hazel nut macciato” with all the casual bravado of a James Bond in training. The poor slob has been slaving in his cubicle all morning — number 62 in his row — trying to stand out from the crowd with his monogrammed shirt (on sale on the Net with an order for three), aware that his life is just going to be more of the same until he is eventually replaced by an algorithm. Now he strides boldly into Starbuck’s and for a moment at least he is the envy of the assembled multitude for his easy mastery of this majestic string of coded nonsense. Life does not offer many such fulfilling moments.

I applaud such rampant imagination. But I remember that “cream and two sugars” did the job for years at twenty-five cents a cup. The world of specialized jargon is also the world of exorbitant prices. (A thousand bucks for a bottle of wine strikes me as a bit exaggerated, just as a million bucks is a bit much for a couple of colored smears and a signature on a piece of cardboard.) If you can afford to play the game and if it makes you feel good, and you have nothing better to do, why should I care? You could have chosen a riskier set of objects to collect — like golf courses or casinos or hotels with gold faucets.

But seeker after status in argot, beware. There is a price beyond the price tag. As we develop these specialized in-group vocabularies, incomprehensible to outsiders, we are cutting the lines of communication among our non-specialist selves, and maybe even within our own minds. Building a verbal wall against the uninitiated helps to ensure your “specialness”, but it may also be creating a barrier between your chosen special world and the real world you are also forced to inhabit. By substituting esoteric in-group terms for ordinary words you are in danger of imbuing them with a separate sense of reality that is independent of “real” reality.

Thus, “possible epidemic vectors” become bloodless statistics to be cited in drafting legislation to hold suffering sick people in forced detention (even though medical specialists, using their own jargon unintelligible to politicians, may have testified that there is no danger of contagion by contact). “Illegals” are easier to deport than the American kids born to loving parents who sneaked into this country to get a better life for their babies, or children adopted from other lands by American parents who forgot to have them naturalized. “Upward income distribution” sounds more academic than “sock it to the poor”. We use the bloodless term “enhanced interrogative techniques” to avoid looking at the sufferings of the poor Afghanis who just happened to be in the vicinity when the IED went off. (And when we sought more details about just what “enhanced interrogation techniques” were, our vice-president dismissed the question as “a bunch of hooey”.) We forget that an “economic refugee” is a human being trying to find a safe road for himself and his wife and children to the future in a world that offers no safety to those born in the wrong place. We forget that wine is just fermented grape juice.

We, as economists, politicians, pundits, forget these basic distinctions at our peril. We may eventually get so good at this kind of sanitizing that we forget that we are all desperate human beings at the mercy of sudden reversal of fortune (a thoughtless left turn, a house built too close to the sea, a shaky extension ladder). Our reliance on jargon will have betrayed us into complacency when we see children with inherited drug addictions or lead poisoning or autism being left to fend for themselves because the funds to help them are needed elsewhere — to grant billionaires tax relief.

Maybe we ought to think seriously about the unifying vocabulary of “milk and two sugars, please” versus the class-divisive “vente latte sweet” to show our in-group cred.