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The study by Barlet et al1 revealed that although death was a frequent topic during family meetings about critically ill infants, the word death was rarely spoken. In an analysis of 33 clinician-family meetings that took place in a neonatal, pediatric, or pediatric cardiac intensive care unit setting, among the 406 identified references to death, die, death, dying, or stillborn were used only 8% of the time. The authors categorized the remaining 92% of references to death as euphemisms, in which the speaker replaces a harsher word such as death with language they anticipate will be less blunt, such as pass away. The authors further broke down this classification into 4 different types of euphemisms: survival framing (eg, not live), colloquialisms (eg, let her go), medical jargon (eg, code event), and pronouns without a clear antecedent (eg, it may happen soon). Frameworks for categorizing medical communication, such as the one Barlet et al1 propose, can be an important tool in addressing how patients and their families understand their health, in this case directly impacting life-and-death decisions. Although clinicians acknowledge the importance of using clear, patient-friendly language, their use of medical jargon with patients remains common.2,3 This mismatch of intent and action has been called jargon oblivion—a clinician’s failure to recognize and mitigate their use of medical jargon despite having a broad awareness that patients may find it confusing.4 Given that consensus guidelines recommend avoiding euphemisms when discussing end-of-life care,5 the findings presented by Barlet and colleagues1 further demonstrate the existence of this mismatch between clinicians’ intentions and their actions. We have argued that unless we equip health care practitioners with ways to recognize words and phrases they use that may be poorly understood by their patients, they will continue to use language that creates confusion. Accordingly, we have published a classification system of 7 types of medical jargon to aid clinicians and health educators with a framework to recognize the nuances of their language choices and appreciate the potential for confusion these can generate.4 Barlet and colleagues1 provide further consideration of types of speech that may obscure a clinician’s intended meaning or distract from their true point in the context of family discussions about critically ill patients. What makes the findings of Barlet et al1 so compelling is that euphemisms—the linguistic mechanism they revealed to be most commonly used when discussing death—are different from the other categories of jargon. The use of most jargon types (eg, technical terminology, abbreviations, medicalized English, and unnecessary synonyms) likely reflects jargon oblivion; the speaker is so accustomed to communicating within their field that they simply forget that not everyone understands the phrases they use. Substituting a euphemism for a word or phrase that may be difficult to hear, by contrast, is often an intentional choice. Unfortunately, euphemistic phrases aimed to be less harsh for patients to hear (eg, pass on instead of die) or to more politely address something that may be perceived as distasteful (eg, voided instead of peed) may still cause confusion among patients. In 1 study, for example, few patients understood cancer euphemisms such as spots or seedlings that health care practitioners may say in place of metastases.6 Another study revealed that the use of terms such as spots or shadows to describe x-ray findings without further clarification can contribute to prolonged anxiety in patients.7 Clinicians may also choose to substitute a euphemism to replace what they recognize may be poorly understood medical jargon, only resulting in further patient confusion. For example, a clinician may intend to be more patient-friendly by calling a + Related article