When “Ready” Means Three Different Things

The integration is next week. Backend reports: “API schema is frozen.” Frontend reports: “Mock components are built.” The standup ends. Everyone agrees: we're ready.

Except Backend means “the contract won't change but two endpoints still return mock data.” Frontend means “the components render but they're wired to local fixtures, not the API.” And QA hasn't been told either of those things.

Everyone used the word “ready.” Nobody meant the same thing.

This Is Linguistic Debt

We coined the term Linguistic Debt to describe the measurable gap between what words mean across teams. It's not miscommunication in the way most people think about it. Nobody is being dishonest. Nobody is being sloppy. The words themselves have drifted.

When Product says “ready,” they mean “the feature is on the roadmap and requirements are written.” When Engineering says “ready,” they mean “the code compiles and basic tests pass.” When the CTO hears “ready,” they hear “we can ship next week.”

Same word. Three different realities. The gap between them is a quantifiable speed tax.

The Westworld Problem

In Westworld, the audience spends an entire season watching events they believe are happening simultaneously—only to discover they're watching different timelines. The show uses identical language and settings to disguise the fact that characters are operating in completely different temporal contexts.

Engineering organizations do the same thing. The integration meeting uses the same vocabulary, the same Jira board, the same Slack channel. Everyone leaves believing they're in the same timeline. They're not.

Expensive Words

Not all words carry the same risk. Through our analysis methodology, we've identified what we call expensive words—terms that consistently trigger clarification requests, scope renegotiation, and rework.

Words like “ready,” “done,” “simple,” “just,” and “edge case” are the most common offenders. Each time one of these words crosses a team boundary without a shared definition, it creates a small tax. That tax compounds. By month 12, it's consuming a measurable percentage of your engineering capacity.

The Question That Reveals It

Next time someone says “ready” in a meeting, try this:

“When we say 'ready,' what would need to be true for you to ship tomorrow?”

Watch the room. The answers will diverge. The gap between them is your Linguistic Debt—the invisible tax on every initiative, every sprint, every integration.

We built a patented methodology to measure this gap systematically, across repositories, tickets, and communication patterns. Not because language problems are new, but because until now, nobody could quantify the cost.

Now you can.