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What do you get when you cross a mafia mobster with a sociologist? An offer you can't understand. It's an old joke, and you could substitute "sociologist" with just about any other "ologist" - the broader point being that professions use language in ways that make it hard for outsiders to understand.

Language isn't only a way of communication, but it is the basis of many different aspects of life. Both science and math are languages of their own, and to be able to understand the style of language can help your brain to think in different ways for science and math.

"But a series of ingenious experiments have shown that many people with dyslexia possess distinctive perceptual abilities. For example, scientists have produced a growing body of evidence that people with the condition have sharper peripheral vision than others. ... Moreover, these capacities appear to trade off: if you're adept at focusing on details located in the center of the visual field, which is key to reading, you're likely to be less proficient at recognizing features and patterns in the broad regions of the periphery. ... Although people with dyslexia are found in every profession, including law, medicine and science, observers have long noted that they populate fields like art and design in unusually high numbers. ... in some situations, it turns out, those with dyslexia are actually the superior learners."

In The Hidden Language, Nat Towsen interviews an insider of a particular subculture in order to examine the terms and phrases created by that subculture to serve its own needs. This is language innate to an insider and incomprehensible, if not invisible, to an outsider.

This article (and the other articles posted in Vice's "Hidden Language" column) lists a sample lexicon of terms that reveal the character of the subculture being studied--some nice examples of professional jargon/insider terminology and the way that professions/social groups shape language.

Due to the rising amount of female figures in this modern day, the local regional council of Sardinia, Italy has decided to ban all "sexist" language from official communication. This includes banning some traditional parts of the Italian language such as the different conjugations and distinctions between a profession based on gender (ie. consigliera instead of consigliere).

This article by Molly Young discusses the preponderance of corporate jargon or "garbage language." Why the metaphor? According to Garbage is what we produce mindlessly in the course of our days and because it smells horrible and looks ugly and we don't think about it except when we're saying that it's bad. But unlike garbage, which we contain in wastebaskets and landfills, the hideous nature of these words - their facility to warp and impede communication - is also their purpose. Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers. It is obvious that the point is concealment; it is less obvious what so many of us are trying to hide.

Lying in politics transcends political party and era. It is, in some ways, an inherent part of the profession of politicking. But Donald Trump is in a different category. The sheer frequency, spontaneity and seeming irrelevance of his lies have no precedent. A whopping 70 percent of Trump's statements that PolitiFact checked during the campaign were false, while only 4 percent were completely true, and 11 percent mostly true. (Compare that to the politician Trump dubbed "crooked," Hillary Clinton: Just 26 percent of her statements were deemed false.) For decades, researchers have been wrestling with the nature of falsehood: How does it arise? How does it affect our brains? Can we choose to combat it? The answers aren't encouraging for those who worry about the national impact of a reign of untruth over the next four, or eight, years. Lies are exhausting to fight, pernicious in their effects and, perhaps worst of all, almost impossible to correct if their content resonates strongly enough with people's sense of themselves, which Trump's clearly do.

Lera Boroditsky, then an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University at the time of this article, looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think. Boroditsky's research data, collected from around the world, suggeststhat people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity. Boroditsky argues that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think - that learning a new language isn't simply learning a new way of talking, but a new way of thinking. Languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses. Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.