The Strategic Linguist Podcast

Welcome to the first episode of Linguistics Unscripted - my little corner of Substack where I can talk about linguistics, reference my work and others that inspire me and discuss some of the important topics. In this episode, I discuss my most read and listened to post in 2025… The Prompt Engineering Myth What I talk about in this episode: * Why I’m starting this audio series (shoutout to Jen Benf...

DISCLAIMER: this is not intended to be an all-encompassing post on the topic of healthcare and the fertility industry. I am focusing on a few key areas and the areas of language that have made the most impact to me. The Industry’s Linguistic Playbook When Uncertainty Becomes Self-Blame The Friend Who Cracked the Code: Influencer Language and the Illusion of Secrets The Language Gap: When Medical D...

This piece examined how hierarchical power amplifies effectiveness. Linguistic capital determines who deploys reality-contradicting claims with minimal cost. Definitional authority determines whose version becomes organisational truth. Documentation often serves gaslighters rather than protecting targets. How The Patterns Change With Power The Compounding Effect Why “Speaking Up” Advice Fails Coun...

In the previous piece in this series, I examined how gaslighting operates through specific discourse structures: three types of assertives (explicit, covert, inclusive), the double direction of fit, face-threatening acts disguised as concern, and anti-performatives. These patterns exploit the cooperative principle - our assumption that people communicate truthfully - to destabilise someone’s grip...

You’re in a meeting. Your manager says, “I never said we’d launch in Q2.” You remember the conversation clearly, you have notes but they continue: “I think you’re misremembering. We always planned for Q3.” Then they add, “You seem stressed lately. Are you sure you’re tracking everything correctly?” Something feels wrong but you can’t pinpoint what. The words sound reasonable. The tone is concerned...

When you type instructions into ChatGPT or Claude, you’re not having a conversation. You might feel like you are because the interface looks like a chat window, the AI responds with “That’s a great question!” and adjusts its tone based on yours but what’s actually happening bears little resemblance to human communication. Prompt engineering is constraint optimisation dressed up as dialogue. Unders...

You’ve probably noticed it. The VP mentions a problem in passing, and everyone believes there’s a problem. The junior analyst raises the same concern with charts and data, and people ask clarifying questions. The director says “trust me, this will work,” and it gets approved. The manager says the same thing and faces skepticism. It’s not about how well they speak. It’s about how their language str...

Meetings are battlegrounds for narrative control. The story that wins becomes the official record, shapes future decisions and determines who gets credited or blamed. The Turn-Taking System You Never Knew You Were Following Linguistic Capital: The Hidden Currency of Meetings Six Conversational Moves of Narrative Control 1. First Narrator Advantage 2. The Pre-Framing Move 3. Narrative Interruption...

Language follows patterns. Jokes work because they set up expectations and violate them at precise moments. Songs feel satisfying because verses and choruses follow predictable structures. Stories engage us because they move through established sequences - setup, complication, resolution - that our minds recognise and anticipate. Business storytelling is no exception. Yet the advice about storytel...

The ability to tell the canonical story is the ability to define reality. When your narrative becomes the accepted version of events, you control what counts as success, who gets credit, and what the organisation learns from its experiences. The Narrator Privilege: Controlling Causality (01.00) Narrative structure gives the storyteller enormous power. When you tell a story, you decide the temporal...

We have been telling stories as a way to understand the world since the dawn of human existence - no matter where it began. We’re hardwired to look for stories, lessons and experiences that we can aspire to, be inspired by, and see ourselves in, to find meaning in our own lives. We need to keep telling these stories - the uncomfortable ones, the ones that make us feel exposed - because that’s how...

The Spider and the Mockingbird: Power Through Language in Westeros and the Workplace An exploration of how Lord Varys and Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish from Game of Thrones embody timeless archetypes of power manipulation through language—and why these characters echo across centuries of human storytelling. Key Themes: How leaders throughout history have relied on intermediaries to bridge the gap b...

Episode Overview While tech CEOs spend billions on compute power and algorithms, they're missing the linguistic patterns that determine whether AI products actually work for billions of users. This isn't a technical problem—it's a cultural intelligence gap at the highest levels of tech leadership. Key Topics Discussed When AI Meets Reality Google AI Overviews telling users to put glue on pizza and...

In Part 1, I explored how the shift from keyword search to conversational commerce represents a fundamental linguistic change - from locutionary acts (literal word matching) to illocutionary acts (understanding intent and context). We looked at three key changes: context-dependence, anaphoric resolution, and the move from lexical to compositional semantics (essentially, from SEO to AEO). Now let’s...

We spent twenty years teaching ourselves to talk like search engines—"running shoes men size 10" instead of actual sentences. Now AI agents understand natural language, and the entire payments infrastructure built for keyword search suddenly needs to learn conversational commerce. In Part 1, I explore: The shift from constrained syntax to natural discourse Why context, pronouns, and semantic under...

That colleague who asks “How’s that project coming along?” might actually be evaluating your competence. Your friend who says “You know we all hang out at that new place downtown” could be trying to manipulate your social choices. The person who opens with “I’m curious about your decision to...” probably isn’t curious at all. What if you could decode these hidden messages instantly? What if you co...

Episode Overview Love them or hate them, Gen Z is shaping the new world. But have you ever looked at their behavior from a linguistics angle? The words they use reveal something profound about shifting power dynamics in our economy. Key Topics Discussed The Language of Financial Identity [18:35] Why Gen Z enters "budgeting eras" instead of just budgeting How "secure the bag" reframes financial beh...

We dive into the hidden world of code switching in professional settings—how millions of workers unconsciously transform their speech patterns every day to navigate workplace hierarchies and survive in corporate culture. Key Topics Covered What Is Code Switching Really? Beyond bilingual language switching How we perform different linguistic identities based on power dynamics The invisible labor of...

Key Concepts Pierre Bourdieu - Linguistic Capital Language functions like money - certain ways of speaking give you social advantages Speech communities use jargon as gatekeepers (medical speak, corporate buzzwords) Your accent/vocabulary can be more valuable than your ideas Michel Foucault - Discourse Creates Reality Language doesn't just reflect power - it actively creates it "Executive presence...

Explore the five core areas of language study and discover why some aspects come naturally to AI while others remain uniquely human territory. Key Points : Language = 5 interconnected systems working simultaneously AI excels: syntax, semantics | Humans excel: phonology, complex pragmatics Sports metaphors bridge semantic meaning + workplace social dynamics Power dynamics in conversation reveal lan...

Episode Overview How American sports metaphors in corporate communication create barriers for global teams and non-native English speakers. Key Topics Discussed The Problem with Corporate Sports Speak Common phrases like "circle back," "coming out of left field," "tackle the big rocks" Why these metaphors exclude rather than clarify Cultural assumptions embedded in business language Real-World Imp...

Rebecca explores the irony of being a linguistics expert who can't speak her heritage language. From childhood poetry books to a Columbia thesis on Sri Lankan linguistic identity, she examines what it means to find your voice when caught between languages - able to read Sinhala letters but not understand their meaning, teaching English to Sinhala speakers, and navigating identity questions in a po...

"The Words That Built a Multi-Trillion Dollar Industry: What Islamic Finance Reveals About Language and Money" Key Topics Covered: How the Arabic word "riba" carries deeper moral meaning than simple "interest" Why translation gaps create barriers to understanding Islamic finance concepts The metaphorical foundations: community language vs. competitive language in finance Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: ho...

Have you ever walked away from a conversation feeling diminished but couldn't explain why? This episode breaks down the science behind detecting condescending speech patterns. We explore how discourse markers, prosodic cues, and linguistic asymmetries signal power dynamics, and why your gut instincts about being talked down to are backed by research. Key Topics Covered The Problem: Linguistic Gasl...

The Current Linguistic World Order English today occupies an unprecedented position in human history, not just as a lingua franca but as the dominant medium through which global power operates. From the boardrooms of multinationals corporations to the algorithms of search engines, from the scientific journals to diplomatic negotiations, English has become what Pierre Bourdieu would recognise as th...