I've always enjoyed books that expand your vocabulary as you read them. Even as an adolescent, I liked Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger series not because of the chintzy musical references (most of which I didn't get), but because he tended to use words I hadn't run across before. Then there was D&D, of course, where Gygax's love for old-fashioned objects and terms would teach you the young mind words like "dais" and "sconce" and "fane." There's Fritz Leiber, who would even make up words as needed (I still enjoy the word "coolth"), and of course Clark Ashton Smith, and many an old pulp writer who loved those fifty-cent words. And then, of course, there's us.

A lot of people went reaching for their dictionaries when Vampire first hit, I think. The Discipline names were all actual words, albeit ones that were uncommonly used. We all knew that "potence" meant "strength," but "celerity" might have been less familiar to some of us, and I know a lot of folks were thrown by "obfuscate." Still, those unfamiliar terms were a good, solid idea. Every game needs its jargon, terms that clearly refer to in-game things when used.

Now, the whole point of jargon is communication. That may seem a little unusual at first, given that a game term may be an unfamiliar word that you've never before heard pronounced in your life. I think we all know some weird mispronunciations that seem to take hold because of that, like pronouncing the "j" in "Brujah" and putting the stress on the second syllable in "Gangrel." As a kid, I consistently mispronounced "paladin" myself, and I still have trouble with the occasional word, as Aileen will attest. (Most of my mispronunciations aren't gaming terms, though; go figure.) So in a way, using unfamiliar terms can obfuscate meaning.

…Yeah, sorry. I couldn't resist.

But those unfamiliar terms are useful precisely because they provide a clearer picture of what you're talking about. Let's take the Discipline of Celerity, for instance. "Celerity" is a real word, of course, but it's also an uncommonly used one. We're more likely to say "speed" or "swiftness" or "quickness" off the tops of our head. By earmarking the Discipline with a fairly obscure term, you increase the chances that when two gamers are talking about a Vampire character and one mentions his "Celerity," then it becomes clear that you're talking about supernatural, vampiric speed. Like all good language, game jargon is a shortcut to communication; the more specific the term, the less time you have to spend clarifying yourself and establishing context.

Another trick that works better in print than in spoken context is the capitalization of specific terms. The first example that springs to mind is "the Embrace." Capitalized, we're clearly dealing with a proper noun, a specific function. Yet when you lower-case it, it becomes a hug. This allows us to keep using phrases like "the two friends embraced" while also allowing us to use "she was Embraced in 1923" instead of having to hunt down a clunkier term. Now, the thing with capitalization is that it's a very useful tool, but it can also get Rightly Silly if you Capitalize Every Other Term.

So when we're looking at a new word to be added to the jargon of a game, capitalization is considered only if there would be a significant difference between the game term and the ordinary use of the word. For instance, we never capitalize "pack" (save if part of a formal noun like "The Ice Marrow Pack"), even though it's the specific term for a bunch of werewolves. We're using "pack" in the same way that anyone else would; there's no meaningful change in what the word means when you apply it to werewolves. On a similar note, "freehold" is not capitalized in Changeling, because it's not a term you're likely to encounter outside of the changeling-specific context. We don't have to differentiate it from the freeholds you'd likely run into every day. On the other hand, we do capitalize the term "Contract," because you could run into contracts that aren't specific powers granted to the fae by ancient pacts.

Yet another consideration for jargon is just plain plausibility, particularly for terms that would be used in-character. Can you see these people adopting such a term in the first place? Or maintaining it? This is a careful balance, as you often want terms that do imply that a society has been around for a long, long time; most of our supernatural societies are like that. At the same time, if a person of modern sensibilities would have trouble saying a word with a straight face... maybe that's not for them.

Then finally, there's the "Did somebody already take it?" clause. I hate this one. "Oh, you can't use the term 'demesne,' Mage used that." "You know, Vampire got to 'coterie' first." This makes it awful tricky to try coming up with new terms that don't cause a lot of confusion. Sometimes you can get away with it if a concept is sufficiently obscure. Yeah, we used the term "fetch" in Changeling, even though Mage used it as well. I'm pretty sure we got away with it, though, as fetches aren't as central a concept to mages, and you usually talk about Changeling's fetch in specific reference to the changelings that inspired them.

That's our approach to jargon, basically. We obviously like the stuff, and the faint feel of "talking in code." But it can get out of hand and silly, and we would like to avoid it.