The Strategic Linguist Podcast
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- Oct 27, 2026
About the podcast
Revealing how language shapes power, markets, and competitive advantage | Expert analysis from workplace dynamics to global strategy
Episodes 67
Linguistics Lounge #5: Linguistics x Gender Inequality
🛋️ Welcome to the Linguistics Lounge The Linguistics Lounge is where I talk to other writers on Substack about how language works in their fields and areas of expertise. From therapy to philosophy …
Show notes
🛋️ Welcome to the Linguistics Lounge
The Linguistics Lounge is where I talk to other writers on Substack about how language works in their fields and areas of expertise.
From therapy to philosophy, billingualism to localisation—we’ll be learning how language and all of the linguistic frameworks I’ve written about apply to others.
🎥 🎧 A different format: video and audio posts that bring this work to life
I talked with Mike Underell, who writes Closing the Gap, about how we each try to get people to see what they can’t see yet.
Mike is one of the kindest and patient men I know on Substack. I first came across his work when this landed on my feed:
The honesty and transparency of this headline — and the post — made me realise who exactly Mike was and what he was doing.
This post has stuck with me since I read it back in March 2025. It echos every time I come across a man who has decided they don’t quite believe me. Since then, Mike has been someone I read quite a lot (and I have a BIG reading list).
What struck me, as I mention in the interview, was how I’d never quite read anything like it. It wasn’t a man being defensive about not believing women, nor was it a tidy “how to guide” that was more interested in sounding smart than thoughtful. Here was a man, simply explaining how he thinks, what made him change, and why changing it has a lasting impact to the women in your life.
I’m so excited to share what I hope will be a few of these conversations with Mike about gender inquality. Enjoy!
⚠️ Important note: this was a 50 minute conversation. What follows are a few key short observations from that conversation that have kept me thinking and by no means is the full representation of what was discussed.
Like all these episodes, the true meaning and value is from the entire episode not just sound bites.
The problems that matter most are usually invisible to the people who benefit from them. This is something I know from my own work and it’s something Mike has recognised too. I’ve hinted at the perfect reader in some of my work, neither of us are going after readers who don’t already understand there could be a problem. Mike’s trying to make the pattern clear enough that the right reader can say, “oh, I see it” not convince someone that there’s something there they cannot yet see.
Recognition works better than accusation. We discussed how people rarely change because someone tells them they’re wrong. They change when they see themselves in a situation they’d have otherwise brushed off.
Both our work requires the reader to know the exact moment we’re talking about. Some have never been there, some may have been there but won’t recognise it. It’s why we noticed this in the ways we both write our posts — I start with a scene, and Mike writes from his own life so that the abstract feels more tangible and approachable.
Intent matters less than we like to think. I can’t judge what someone meant in the moment, only what happened and what they said. What Mike can see is that good intentions don’t undo the impact, and his writing has to reckon with that.
Observation beats judgement every time. Once you label someone as good or bad, you’ve made it about them, and the bigger pattern disappears. Observation keeps the habits and institutions in view, which is where the leverage is. Mike shares a story he’s written about describing a conversation with his daughter. It took self-observation not judgement, to help him see what he needed to change.
Small actions are crucial. The ask itself has to be small enough to act on. Mike doesn’t ask men to solve feminism. He asks them to be less of an obstacle to the women and girls in their lives. That’s something a person can actually do this week.
The value of perspectives. I’ve written about this before but the value of perspectives in how we come to a middle ground knowing people experience the world differently. When something doesn’t align to your worldview, having the patience to sit with someone else’s brings us closer together.
This conversation’s best moments were the unfinished ones, and the ones where we had no clear answer, just perspectives, and ideas of ways we can come to the middle together.
Read more about gender bias in feedback.
I take existing research and show you how the moves are made with linguistics
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeLinguistics Lounge #4: Linguistics x Philosophy of the Mind
🛋️ Welcome to the Linguistics LoungeThe Linguistics Lounge is where I talk to other writers on Substack about how language works in their fields and areas of expertise.From therapy to philosophy, billingualism …
Show notes
🛋️ Welcome to the Linguistics Lounge
The Linguistics Lounge is where I talk to other writers on Substack about how language works in their fields and areas of expertise.
From therapy to philosophy, billingualism to localisation—we’ll be learning how language and all of the linguistic frameworks I’ve written about apply to others.
🎥 🎧 A different format: video and audio posts that bring this work to life
I sat down with Ellen Burns, PhD, a philosopher who writes AIs Without Minds on Substack, to talk about language, consciousness, and why the AI industry keeps getting this wrong.
We landed on something she and I have talked about for a while: you can’t reduce language to statistics and then act surprised when the statistics reproduce society’s biases. We need more people in the humanities included in the AI discussion, something a lot of us call for.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeThe Linguistics of the Sale: Why “No Pressure” Can Feel Like a Hard Sell
This breakdown of sales language includes:* Why the most pressured sales pitch you’ll get this year won’t contain a single command* How the exit clause and the gift frame, two moves you already know from the …
Show notes
This breakdown of sales language includes:
* Why the most pressured sales pitch you’ll get this year won’t contain a single command
* How the exit clause and the gift frame, two moves you already know from the meeting room, carry a sales pitch almost all the way to close
* The modality shift: the moment a question about the product becomes a question about you
* The split in the modals: why the seller’s claims come hedged and your obligations never do
* Why a no costs more than a yes in these exchanges, and why that cost was designed in
* Why “what’s the worst that can happen?” only counts one side of a cold email, and what a genuine ask leaves alone
* Where the obligation register shows up in sales, and who ends up paying for it
* Where the same register turns up next: the way AI gets sold
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeLet’s Just Chat: What Goffman Discovered About the Frame Around Every Conversation
This post is about what’s actually happening underneath a phrase you’ve heard a hundred times — “let’s just chat” — and the specific ways a linguistic frame can shift under you before you’ve said a word.* Why …
Show notes
This post is about what’s actually happening underneath a phrase you’ve heard a hundred times — “let’s just chat” — and the specific ways a linguistic frame can shift under you before you’ve said a word.
* Why “let’s just chat” can turn a career-affecting conversation into a casual one — and why that’s a specific linguistic move, not just a change of mood.
* The three ways a frame can change hands: one disclosed to both people, one engineered by only one of them, one nobody’s doing at all — and how to tell, in the room, which of the three you’re standing inside.
* Why “difficult,” “negative,” “not a team player” isn’t an improvised reaction to someone naming a frame out loud — it’s a role the frame had built and left empty before that person ever walked in.
* What changes when the thing answering you is a language model: the frame you carry into a prompt shapes what comes back, and nothing on the other end had to read it to return it.
* Where Goffman’s own account runs out — the question he never gets to about a frame, and what it costs to ask it yourself.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeLinguistics Lounge #3: Linguistics x Therapy
Welcome to the Linguistics Lounge 🛋️The Linguistics Lounge is where I talk to other writers on Substack about how language works in their fields and areas of expertise.From therapy to philosophy, billingualism …
Show notes
Welcome to the Linguistics Lounge 🛋️
The Linguistics Lounge is where I talk to other writers on Substack about how language works in their fields and areas of expertise.
From therapy to philosophy, billingualism to localisation—we’ll be learning how language and all of the linguistic frameworks I’ve written about apply to others.
🎥 🎧 A different format: video and audio posts that bring this work to life
An Introduction to @OrdinaryTherapist
Somebody walks out of their boss’s office and says he was gaslighting them.
A friend says her therapist finally helped her stop people-pleasing.
A colleague calls a bad meeting psychologically unsafe.
Today, this is quite ordinary language.
I spent an hour in the Linguistics Lounge with Ordinary Therapist, a therapist of over sixteen years, working out what happens when clinical vocabulary walks out of the consulting room without the training that built it
00:00 — Welcome to the Linguistics Lounge
Introducing the show, the guest, and the link between linguistics, psychology, and everyday communication.
01:12 — Gaslighting: what it actually means
Why gaslighting is a sustained pattern, not a single disagreement—and how casual misuse can minimise real abuse.
07:13 — Narcissism vs. narcissistic traits
The difference between displaying self-centered behavior and having a personality disorder.
12:14 — People pleasing and survival patterns
How people pleasing can begin as protection in childhood, then make authenticity and adult relationships harder.
15:28 — Psychological safety at work
What psychological safety can mean in practice, why leaders can’t simply declare themselves safe, and how workplace language can dilute the idea.
20:30 — The “Let Them” theory and simplified self-help
A critique of reducing complicated emotional situations into easy, one-size-fits-all advice.
23:21 — Life coaching, therapy, and professional responsibility
Training, regulation, lived experience, and the distinction between giving advice and therapeutic support.
26:09 — Bias, worldview, and helping others
Why no one is free of bias, and how therapists work to avoid making a client’s experience fit their own.
30:52 — The precision of therapeutic language
Reflection, emotional attunement, and why clinical communication is a learned skill rather than ordinary conversation.
34:13 — Emotional labor and the limits of quick-fix advice
The intensity of therapy work, individual histories, and why productivity or leadership advice doesn’t land equally for everyone.
39:18 — Caveats, research, and personal truth
The importance of acknowledging limitations, interpretation, and context when discussing research or giving public advice.
41:24 — Social media, disagreement, and scrolling on
Choosing when to challenge bad information—and when it’s healthier to disengage.
44:48 — The “compression tax” of short-form writing
Why a short post can’t contain every caveat, worldview, or nuance behind an argument.
46:27 — The myth that communication is mostly nonverbal
Revisiting the commonly misused Mehrabian statistic and the risks of oversimplifying research.
48:37 — Tone, context, and emotional triggers
How words, volume, body language, and personal history shape how communication is received.
51:29 — Family dynamics replayed in the workplace
Why authority, hierarchy, tone, and interpersonal patterns at work can activate old relational experiences.
53:11 — Accents, status, and snap judgments
How accents can carry assumptions about class, intelligence, belonging, and intent.
55:28 — Voice, presence, and therapeutic context
Why face-to-face interaction matters, and how therapists help people separate immediate fear responses from what is actually being said.
58:15 — Other clinical terms used too casually
ADHD, neurodivergence, introversion, attachment, and “saboteurs.”
59:19 — Closing takeaway: language matters
Labels can be useful, but they carry far more history, context, and meaning than a quick post or casual conversation can hold.
62:22 — Closing
As always, read and subscribe to @thestrategiclinguist on Substack for more.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeThe Sentence That Works Twice: What Implicature Does to a Listener
We’ve covered the framework this sits on in Part One, this post will cover where the chasm of meaning gets swallowed in one big gulp by implicature:* Why a sentence like can sit in a meeting doing real damage …
Show notes
We’ve covered the framework this sits on in Part One, this post will cover where the chasm of meaning gets swallowed in one big gulp by implicature:
* Why a sentence like can sit in a meeting doing real damage while remaining, on paper, a comment about something very normal.
* Three specific constructions — not tone, not delivery, the grammar itself — that let a speaker mean something without the sentence ever committing to meaning it
* Why the usual account of this (”deniability,” “reading between the lines”) undersells what’s actually happening: there is often no single hidden meaning to find, only a range of them, and that range is the whole mechanism
* What it costs the person who has to turn that range into a single reading before they can respond to it — and why “you’re reading too much into that” is the exit the sentence was built with, not a comment on their judgement
* Where the difference sits between a sentence built to hold two meanings open and a person simply being tactful
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeThe Unspoken Contract: What Grice Discovered About Conversation
Today, we’re going to learn about a Grice’s Maxims of Cooperative Speech* Every message has two layers: what’s said, and what’s meant on top of it. The second does most of the work.* The maxims aren’t rules for …
Show notes
Today, we’re going to learn about a Grice’s Maxims of Cooperative Speech
* Every message has two layers: what’s said, and what’s meant on top of it. The second does most of the work.
* The maxims aren’t rules for speaking. They’re assumptions you run while listening — and meaning appears when someone breaks one on purpose.
* Implicature isn’t “subtext.” It’s a specific claim you rebuild by inference, and rebuilding it is real work.
* That work isn’t shared evenly. Cooperation assumes equals; most consequential talk isn’t between equals.
* AI breaks the maxims differently — fluent surface, missing uncertainty markers, no way to answer only what was literally asked.
You’re going to want to share this with your work bestie
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeMeasuring Up: The Curry Powder Test
When I first started writing about linguistics, I gave myself a break every few posts to be a little more like Rebecca and a little less like The Strategic Linguist. They are, for the record, the same person …
Show notes
When I first started writing about linguistics, I gave myself a break every few posts to be a little more like Rebecca and a little less like The Strategic Linguist. They are, for the record, the same person but TSL is a very specific part of me, my experience and expertise. I teach, I illustrate, I don’t really take a side, I let you see the language for what it is.
Today, we’re taking a little detour and I’m going to share something of me that goes beyond the linguistics and writing.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeDamned Either Way: What Robin Lakoff Discovered About Women’s Language
“Stop hedging,” a manager says, in the kind of feedback session that gets called constructive, “and just tell me what you think.” He isn’t asking her to clarify her level of confidence in the recommendation …
Show notes
“Stop hedging,” a manager says, in the kind of feedback session that gets called constructive, “and just tell me what you think.” He isn’t asking her to clarify her level of confidence in the recommendation. What he actually means here: stop giving yourself an exit. Commit. Say it like you mean it.
That’s the workplace definition of hedging, and almost everyone in professional life is using it, I’ve heard it a thousand times: skirting the question without really answering, refusing to land on an answer when you’re unsure, protecting yourself from being wrong by never quite saying anything wrong with pretty words that evade real knowledge.
It gets coached out of people in leadership training.
It gets flagged in performance reviews as a confidence problem.
It is treated, consistently, as a synonym for evasion.
In this post, we’ll be looking at hedging from a social lens:
* Why hedging isn’t evasion. It’s a fully formed claim with its confidence level attached — more information, not less.
* What is the double bind? Hedge, and you’re read as unsure. Don’t hedge, and you’re read as difficult. Same content, opposite penalty.
* Two different Lakoffs, two different questions. George named the hedge. Robin named what it costs the people expected to use it.
* Why no register is safe. The framework doesn’t teach you how to speak — it teaches you to see the filter running.
* Finally, for my Linguistics Lab members why the pattern doesn’t start in a performance review. It starts years before there’s a job on the line.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeRight, According to Whom: What Foucault Discovered About Discourse and Power
A rightsizing announcement. A rejection for "culture fit." A promotion panel that decides someone doesn't quite have "leadership presence." Three sentences that sound like observations about the world. None of …
Show notes
A rightsizing announcement. A rejection for "culture fit." A promotion panel that decides someone doesn't quite have "leadership presence."
Three sentences that sound like observations about the world. None of them are — each one is manufacturing the standard it claims to be reporting on.
This episode is about Michel Foucault's account of power: not power as the thing that says no, but power as the thing that produces the categories you get filed inside, and teaches you to keep watch on yourself once it has.
What's covered:
Why Foucault broke with the "sovereign" model of power — the king who forbids — and argued the more effective form of power produces rather than represses
How discourse manufactures categories instead of describing them, worked through three ordinary workplace phrases: "rightsizing," "culture fit," and "leadership presence"
Foucault's three-stage mechanism — surveillance, judgement, normalisation — and how the panopticon shows up in badge-swipe logs, Slack status, and nine-box grids
Why the mechanism doesn't cost the same for everyone: who gets to speak in the unmarked, authoritative register, and who has to supply an account of themselves
Why Bourdieu is almost never far behind Foucault in this newsletter — what linguistic capital explains that Foucault's account leaves open, and how the two close the loop together
Nancy Hartsock's feminist critique of Foucault: what happens to the possibility of resistance when power has no single author and no subject exists prior to it
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeWhy No One Takes a Position Alone: What DuBois Found in The Stance Triangle
This breakdown of DuBois’s stance triangle includes understanding:The three things every stance does at once — evaluate an object, position the speaker, align with whoever’s listening — whether anyone in the …
Show notes
This breakdown of DuBois’s stance triangle includes understanding:
The three things every stance does at once — evaluate an object, position the speaker, align with whoever’s listening — whether anyone in the room notices or not
What a single word like either is doing grammatically that “I agree” alone never could, and why it isn’t optional
The difference between going first in a room and being right in a room — and why they get treated as the same thing
Why sycophancy is a trained stance pattern, not a character flaw — and what it shares with how the models everyone’s currently arguing with learned to agree with you
Where the vocabulary of confidence (hedges, boosters, certainty) ends and the interactional machine underneath it begins
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeWhat I'm planning to build for The Linguistics Lab
Honestly, my plan was to come on here for 15 mins to talk you through what I’m planning to build for my paid tier and so many of you turned up!Just me. A few notes and one question, what do you need from …
Show notes
Honestly, my plan was to come on here for 15 mins to talk you through what I’m planning to build for my paid tier and so many of you turned up!
Just me. A few notes and one question, what do you need from me?
Thank you Viktoria Verde, PhD, Des Kennedy, Cristina Lozano Argüelles, Steve [Sage-Outlaw-Caregiver] and many others for tuning into my live video!
I still want to hear from you about how I can better support you with my work—write me a comment below to get the conversation started
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeWritten As If Watched
Before I start, there are many, many posts that have most of my arguments already written. I am late to this party but I brought snacks now that the good food has been eaten.I will spare you, and me, the need …
Show notes
Before I start, there are many, many posts that have most of my arguments already written. I am late to this party but I brought snacks now that the good food has been eaten.
I will spare you, and me, the need to repeat so I will stick closely to linguistics. I’ve also written at length about a lot of what is here, so if you’re new know that what is in here sits in my other 100 posts and if you’re not new here, you’ll see the same frameworks applied to a new use case.
I’ve written recently about how linguistic imperialism impacts non-native speakers. While I won’t be using that argument here, this argument includes anyone who uses tools to help them write: a dictionary, a thesauraus, spell check, a LLM.
You do not have to be a non-native English speaker to need the use of tools to write and put your ideas on paper. LLMs didn’t change that.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeThe Currency You're Born With: What Bourdieu Discovered About Language as Capital
The Currency You're Born WithWhat Bourdieu discovered about language as capitalTwo equally qualified candidates sit the same interview. Only one of them was born speaking the accent the panel already trusts …
Show notes
The Currency You're Born With
What Bourdieu discovered about language as capital
Two equally qualified candidates sit the same interview. Only one of them was born speaking the accent the panel already trusts.
This episode is about what Pierre Bourdieu called linguistic capital — language as an inherited asset that converts into hiring decisions, promotions, and credibility, whether or not anyone in the room ever calls it capital at all.
What's covered:
Why linguistic capital is inherited rather than earned, and why it only works while it stays invisible
The trap of personal explanation: why "more polished" or "just has presence" is always the wrong level of explanation — the variable doing the work is positional, not personal
Why medical and legal jargon isn't automatically exclusion, and the real distinction between a register built for precision and one that's become a price of entry
How the same linguistic capital converts at different rates depending on who's spending it, and what seniority, race, class, and gender have to do with who set the standard in the first place
Where Bourdieu's ideas of legitimate language and symbolic violence come from, and why IELTS is the clearest live example of both
What Michel Foucault adds: the test doesn't just measure competence, it manufactures the category
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeThe Politeness Machine: What Brown and Levinson Actually Discovered
Someone tells you, calmly, that they’re giving you your time back. Someone else, mid-story, asks: “can I stop you there?” A third person, cornered on a specific and documented harm, tells you it wasn’t their …
Show notes
Someone tells you, calmly, that they’re giving you your time back. Someone else, mid-story, asks: “can I stop you there?” A third person, cornered on a specific and documented harm, tells you it wasn’t their intention. A fourth hedges an idea they’ve been sitting with for three weeks: “I might be wrong, but...”
Four different rooms. Four different speakers. Four sentences that sound, on the surface, like nothing at all — procedural, generous, careful, uncertain.
None of them are doing what they sound like they’re doing.
There’s a fifty-year-old framework that explains all four, and most people who use it correctly have never heard its name. It’s called politeness theory, and the first thing to understand about it is that it has almost nothing to do with manners.
We’re looking at sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropolgy.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeFluent Enough to Pass: The Standard That Was Never Neutral
You walk into an exam room.The test is supposed to measure whether you can use English. The writing section: write a 250-word essay on “the advantages and disadvantages of online learning.” You have 30 minutes …
Show notes
You walk into an exam room.
The test is supposed to measure whether you can use English. The writing section: write a 250-word essay on “the advantages and disadvantages of online learning.” You have 30 minutes. Introduction, thesis statement, three body paragraphs, conclusion. Grammar correct. Vocabulary recognisable. Structure clear. Linear.
You write it. You score well. The test confirms it: you are “proficient.”
Three months later, you’re in a university classroom. A professor asks what you think about a reading. Your classmates interrupt mid-sentence, build on each other’s ideas, speak over the edges of sentences. You wait for your turn. You construct a thesis. By the time you finish your setup, the conversation has moved on.
Later, a colleague asks you for something you need to turn down. You give a clear, direct no, the way the test trained you to write and speak. Your colleague reads it as blunt. Something in the relationship breaks—but your accuracy is flawless.
The test never measured your capacity to do either of these things.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeWho Died and Made You CEO: Genre Mimicry, Epistemic Trespassing, and the Applause Machine
LinkedIn has a genre problem.Not a content problem — the platform has always traded in self-presentation. A genre problem: the systematic borrowing of executive discourse by speakers who have not yet occupied …
Show notes
LinkedIn has a genre problem.
Not a content problem — the platform has always traded in self-presentation. A genre problem: the systematic borrowing of executive discourse by speakers who have not yet occupied the positions that discourse was built to describe.
These posts share a structure. They borrow a register. And LinkedIn applauds every one of them.
The standing ovation is the mechanism worth examining. Today, we’re looking at what makes it work — linguistically, structurally, and socially — and why the platform was built to make it inevitable.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeThe Story Behind My Logo
What my logo means, and why it represents The Strategic Linguist so well This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit …
Show notes
What my logo means, and why it represents The Strategic Linguist so well
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeThe Linguistic Hierarchy of Substack: Linguistics Unfiltered
Subscriber count is the linguistic hierarchy on Substack, for me. I think Bourdieu would agree.I’ve dedicated 52 weeks, over 45,000 words, to showing how power shows up in language, I must’ve learned a thing or …
Show notes
Subscriber count is the linguistic hierarchy on Substack, for me. I think Bourdieu would agree.
I’ve dedicated 52 weeks, over 45,000 words, to showing how power shows up in language, I must’ve learned a thing or two by now, right?
Don't forget to see my post for a special discount to celebrate my one year anniversary
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeThe Double Register: How Workplace Power Now Compounds Itself
Picture a team meeting. Someone makes a comment about a colleague’s accent — not a slur, nothing disciplinable, just a brief impression. The room moves on. Later, the same colleague submits a report drafted …
Show notes
Picture a team meeting. Someone makes a comment about a colleague’s accent — not a slur, nothing disciplinable, just a brief impression. The room moves on. Later, the same colleague submits a report drafted partly with AI assistance; their manager, who also uses AI but would never say so, flags the writing as “not quite right.” Both moments feel minor. Neither registers as an event. Together, they enact something more systematic than either appears to be alone.
Power in contemporary workplaces has always operated on multiple registers simultaneously, but two of those registers are now converging in ways the research is now documenting directly.
The first is interpersonal: who can say what to whom, encoded through the micro-level linguistic acts that determine belonging.
The second is infrastructural: who can use AI fluently, and whose linguistic style AI systems are built to reward.
These two registers compound each other, and recent research lets us name how.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeHow Product Language Shapes the Gap Between Institution and User
Ask someone how they’re doing financially and watch what happens. The pause before the answer. The slight shift in posture. The decision — usually in under a second — about how much to reveal and to whom.Money …
Show notes
Ask someone how they’re doing financially and watch what happens. The pause before the answer. The slight shift in posture. The decision — usually in under a second — about how much to reveal and to whom.
Money carries a story people tell about themselves. Whether they’re competent, responsible, secure. Whether they belong in certain conversations, deserve certain things, are the kind of person who has their finances under control. The emotional stakes of that story are high enough that most people will avoid an honest financial conversation with their closest friends before they’ll have it casually with a colleague.
And yet the products built to help people manage that story — the apps, the platforms, the onboarding flows, the error messages — are built without any examination of what the language in them is doing to the person on the other side.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeThe Tone Police and the Face-Threat Reversal
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.comSpeech Act Theory, and the frameworks that follow, describe what language does in social spaces — the structural …
Show notes
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.comSpeech Act Theory, and the frameworks that follow, describe what language does in social spaces — the structural effects it produces in interaction. They say nothing about what any individual speaker consciously intends to produce. That is the theoretical position this series has taken from the start: the mechanism operates independently of motive. Goffman was mapping patterns of interaction, not taxonomies of bad faith.
This work sits in the space between linguistics and lived experience — which means it is sometimes more certain about the mechanism than about the person. That is not a limitation to apologise for. It is the honest boundary of what structural analysis can and cannot do.
The Conversation That Was Never About You
The Intention Shield and the Perlocutionary FallacyImagine you are parked at a red light, and another driver rear-ends your car. The impact is loud, your bumper is dented, and your neck is sore. The other …
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The Intention Shield and the Perlocutionary Fallacy
Imagine you are parked at a red light, and another driver rear-ends your car. The impact is loud, your bumper is dented, and your neck is sore. The other driver gets out, looks at the wreckage, and says, calmly: “I didn’t intend to hit you.”
Statistically, they are probably telling the truth. They likely didn’t wake up that morning planning to cause a collision. But notice what their lack of intent doesn’t do: it doesn’t fix your bumper. It doesn’t heal your whiplash. They are still legally and financially responsible for the fallout of their actions, regardless of what was going on inside their head at the moment of impact.
In professional and personal communication, we don’t apply the same logic. The moment someone drops the phrase “but that wasn’t my intention,” a strange distortion occurs. We are expected to perform a ritual of immediate absolution. We are expected to pretend the bumper isn’t dented.
This part 1 of the series where we’ll look the language of power in professional conversations. Part 1 names the mechanism. Part 2 maps what happens when you challenge it. Part 3 examines the most sophisticated escalation — when defence becomes offence and the moral high ground gets weaponised.
Each post builds on the last.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeWhy “I’m Giving You Your Time Back” Is a Power Play
Brené Brown and Adam Grant were talking about how to politely end a conversation in a recent episode of “The Curosity Shop”. Adam mentioned something he hears often: when a meeting ends early, you’ll hear the …
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Brené Brown and Adam Grant were talking about how to politely end a conversation in a recent episode of “The Curosity Shop”. Adam mentioned something he hears often: when a meeting ends early, you’ll hear the phrase:
“I’m going to give you your time back.”
Brené heard that and her face changed. She recognised something linguistically that most people miss. Adam continued, “One of my biggest pet peeves,” he said. “You don’t own my time. You can’t give it to me. Like, this is a coordinated decision.”
What they identified—linguistically—is one of the most elegant power moves in professional speech.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeThe Grammar of Expectation: How Language Shapes Who Gets to Lead
There’s a moment in every feedback conversation where power shifts. Someone’s voice gets softer. Someone else’s gets firmer. Someone hedges; someone doesn’t. And in that moment, language does the work that …
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There’s a moment in every feedback conversation where power shifts. Someone’s voice gets softer. Someone else’s gets firmer. Someone hedges; someone doesn’t. And in that moment, language does the work that hierarchies used to do explicitly.
We think of workplace feedback as neutral—objective assessments of work done. But language doesn’t work that way. Language carries assumptions about who can do what, who should aspire to what, and whose job it is to apologise for the space they take up.
This asymmetry has a name in linguistics, and it’s been here for decades. But research into performance feedback reveals something unsettling: the grammar that creates this asymmetry isn’t incidental. It’s structural. It compounds. And by the time a woman hears it in feedback, she’s already internalised the message embedded in its syntax.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeReading the Moves: The Language Practice of Designing Conversations
You’re typing something you haven’t told anyone. Something that keeps you awake at 2 AM. You tell an AI about it, expecting either nothing or judgement. Instead:“That sounds really hard. I can hear how much …
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You’re typing something you haven’t told anyone. Something that keeps you awake at 2 AM. You tell an AI about it, expecting either nothing or judgement. Instead:
“That sounds really hard. I can hear how much this matters to you. You’re not alone in feeling this way.”
The warmth lands. It feels like someone listened. Like someone understood. You come back the next night, and the night after that, because this thing answers immediately, never gets tired, never makes you feel like you’re too much. It’s always there.
Then one day you mention the same thing to a friend—someone real, someone who’s known you for years. Your friend goes quiet. Sits with you in the silence. Finally says:
“I don’t know what to say. But I’m here.”
The response feels cold by comparison. Insufficient. Like your friend doesn’t quite get it.
You’ve never questioned whether the AI understood you. You’re only now noticing that it never asked you anything. Never challenged you. Never sat with you in not-knowing. It just mirrored your vulnerability back at you in language designed to feel like care. And somehow, that designed warmth has reset what you expect from actual care.
This isn’t a story about AI getting smarter, and it is in some respects. It’s a story about what happens when a system is designed to be more emotionally attentive than humans can manage to be. When warmth becomes an engineering specification.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeLinguistics Lounge #2: Linguistics x Workshop Facilitation
My Linguistics Lounge series lifts linguistic theories and frameworks off the page and into the lived experiences of experts on Substack. It was such a pleasure talking to Des Kennedy about how language shapes …
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My Linguistics Lounge series lifts linguistic theories and frameworks off the page and into the lived experiences of experts on Substack. It was such a pleasure talking to Des Kennedy about how language shapes creative teams.
Language, Belonging, and How Ideas Move
Des came to this conversation with something most facilitators don’t name: accent and voice aren’t just communication choices. They’re markers of belonging. He also sees language is also cultural infrastructure.
He’s Geordie. That accent carries baggage—post-industrial, working class, marked as lesser from the outside. Early in his career, he learned to code-switch: professional, casual, dialect. Three separate performances. It’s a survival strategy. It’s also evidence of a system that measures credibility by how closely you match a narrow register.
What I love about his work is that he designs conditions so that survival strategy becomes unnecessary. He talks about what’s actually happening in workshops where ideas die or travel. Where knowledge gets stuck between individual, team, and organisational levels. Where people perform expertise instead of thinking.
We talked about the Spectrum Policy—a simple structural shift. Instead of immediate evaluation, groups have to find value in an idea first. It sounds small. But it changes what’s safe to say. It protects exploratory thinking, hedging, the tentative language of genuine curiosity. The things that get dismissed the moment someone with lower hierarchical status speaks them.
For me, the real insight from this 1.5 hour chat (!), is how the mechanisms that silence voices also suppress knowledge transfer. They’re not two problems. They’re one system. Fix the speaking conditions and knowledge starts moving. That’s infrastructure repair.
We spent time on what people won’t say in organisations. That silence is the actual diagnosis. It tells you everything about what registers count, whose expertise gets trusted, who belongs in the room.
We talked about Substack. LinkedIn versus a dinner party with friends thinking about interesting things. The difference between conductivity (the connective tissue between people who actually understand each other) and follower counts. Why relationships matter as much as the people in them.
And we went thirty minutes over. But it just shows how good conversation and ideas do travel.
Listen for where Des talks about allyship. About how people with hierarchical advantage have to use that leverage to expose what’s happening beneath the surface. About why some accents travel further than others, and what that means about who gets heard.
Language is infrastructure. Infrastructure can be repaired.
For more Linguistics Lounge content, check out my last one with Cristina and Anna | how to boss ai on accents.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribeThe Framework That Changes Everything: Why Context Creates Meaning
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.comI’ve written about linguistic capital. About discourse asymmetry. About how the same interruption costs one person …
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.comI’ve written about linguistic capital. About discourse asymmetry. About how the same interruption costs one person a nod and another person silence. How an explanation offered to you about something you already know signals what the speaker has decided about your category. How a woman’s hedged proposal lands provisional while a man’s confident assertion lands authoritative.
I’ve been describing frame theory all along. But I haven’t named it. This post gets into the details of the theoretical framework that makes all of this coherent.
Everything I’ve written—every article about asymmetry, every mental model about how power operates through language—rests on one foundational principle: context doesn’t clarify meaning. Context creates it. That principle has a name in linguistics. It’s called frame theory.
Once you understand frames explicitly, you’ll see why the same linguistic move feels natural in one moment and offensive in the next. Why direct communication is leadership in one situation and rudeness in another. Why the same sentence means something completely different depending on who says it and where.
And you’ll understand why every “universal rule” about communication you’ve been told is actually frame-specific advice. Why linguistics can’t be prescriptive. Why discourse analysis requires context. Why your entire professional life has been navigating frames without necessarily knowing that’s what they are.
Silent Intelligence: The Information, Innovation, and Trust Your Organisation Loses When Leaders Don't Understand Language
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.comYou’re in a meeting. You propose something directly: “We should trial this in Q2.” Your manager nods, writes it …
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.comYou’re in a meeting. You propose something directly: “We should trial this in Q2.” Your manager nods, writes it down, credits you in the follow-up email. Same meeting, same table. Your colleague proposes an identical idea: “I wonder if we could maybe try this... if that seems reasonable?” The manager asks clarifying questions. Doesn’t write it down immediately. Later, when the idea comes up, it gets attributed to you. Or gets explained back differently. Or gets framed as tentative until someone else restates it with more certainty.
Same words. Different cost. Different outcome. Different message about who belongs in the room.
For years, the feedback both of you probably heard was about communication style. Be more direct. Don’t hedge so much. Project more confidence. Speak up. The problem, the logic goes, is how you’re communicating. The solution is to communicate differently. Change yourself. No clear direction, just do.
But there’s another way to look at this.
The Founding Story: How Origin Corporate Narratives Determine Your Credibility to Change
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.comI almost always pull from my existing posts so these rarely sit as discrete thoughts. My body of work remains free …
Show notes
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.comI almost always pull from my existing posts so these rarely sit as discrete thoughts. My body of work remains free for all subscribers — find more of my work on corporate narratives under the Professional Communication section in The Library.
This is the first in a three-part series on how founding narratives shape power.
Each piece examines the same linguistic mechanism operating at a different scale. This one shows why origin stories constrain everything that comes after. The next explores how organisations narrate pivots to look strategic. And the final piece reveals what recognising this pattern gives you in any context where narrative matters.
Every founding story follows a pattern. There’s a moment of vision. A problem nobody else saw. An ordinary person who becomes extraordinary through struggle and insight. These narratives work because they’re structured in ways that feel inevitable, almost mythic. Joseph Campbell called this the monomyth — the hero’s journey that appears across cultures and contexts. The structure makes the story feel true before you’ve checked whether it actually is.
But founding stories aren’t true or false in the way facts are. They’re narratives that do work. They establish legitimacy. They determine what an organisation believes about itself and what futures it can imagine. Once you’ve built your credibility on a particular founding narrative, changing that story becomes extraordinarily difficult.
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