Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Angle
A project glossary does not have the function of a dictionary: it does not state what a word means in general, it settles what it means here, for this team and for the decisions it has to take. Customer signal does not have one true meaning that Sales, Support and Product are unaware of; it has a meaning that has been settled on, and it is the act of settling that makes the four functions work on the same object. Everything else follows from that locality: the entry is short because it serves to use the word, not to exhaust the concept; it names its neighbours — messaging, tagline, value proposition — because a meaning is only fixed against the ones surrounding it; it is worth nothing outside the context that produced it, and that is precisely why it is worth something inside. A collection of general and accurate definitions does not fail to be exact: it fails to settle anything at all.
Synthesis
Taken separately, these notes each settle a question of writing: how to tell a word from a proposition, when to stop, what to write first, when to open a glossary, what breaks when you have none.
Put together, they say something else. Brevity, the section on confusions, the threshold of several readers and the fragility of links are not five independent rules: they are five consequences of the same choice to define only locally. An entry is short because it aims at a precise use and not at a concept. Neighbours are named because, in a given context, a boundary settles things where an essence would say nothing. The threshold of several readers is the point beyond which a context stops being tacitly shared. And a link between two notes carries meaning only if the two words it brings together are settled within the same context — a word defined in general leaves the link exactly as vague as an undefined word.
That is what separates documentary infrastructure from a tool of collective precision, even though the two produce texts that look alike. The second is recognized by what it refuses: the definition that holds true everywhere.
Tensions / contradictions
Locality has a downside these notes do not settle: a meaning fixed for one team becomes an obstacle as soon as it has to be set against that of a partner, a customer or an outside source. The glossary that makes it easier to translate a source's concepts into the project's language is also the one that installs a dialect.
There is also an internal tension between two pieces of advice from the same family: stabilizing early exposes disagreements cheaply, but freezing the meaning of a word before the choice it carries has been made manufactures agreement on the word in place of the choice.
Questions
- Should a local glossary declare the outside senses it sets aside, or does that inventory drag it back towards the dictionary it refuses to be?
- How do you recognize that a context has changed to the point where yesterday's settled meanings no longer hold, when nothing in the entries says so?