Readied Actions, Bandwidth, And Lossy Language Compression

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…

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