I don’t think I would really consider it compression if it’s not very reversible. Whatever people “uncompress” from my words isn’t necessarily what I was imagining or thinking about when I encoded them. I guess it’s more like a symbolic shorthand for meaning which relies on the second party to build their own internal model out of their own (shared public interface, but internal implementation is relatively unique…) symbols.

It is compression, but it is lossy. Just like the digital counterparts like mp3 and jpeg, in some cases the final message can contain all the information you need.