Watch your Language: The Hidden Power of Words in the Workplace - Blog

“Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides." — Rita Mae Brown

If you’re bilingual or ever had to “code switch” based on your social context, you know Rita is right. This isn't just about swapping words; it's about inhabiting a completely different reality. This phenomenon, which linguists call the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or "

The same goes, of course, for human beings. The distancing effect of language facilitates exploitation, cruelty, murder, and genocide. When the other party to a relationship is a mere member of a generic category, be it “customer,” “terrorist,” or “employee,” exploitation or murder comes much more easily. Racial epithets serve the same purpose: we

“Language doesn’t just make things—it assembles, cobbles together, entire worlds and all the relations within.”

“Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of

1. Pick a word to examine. As you comb through a management text, a magazine article, or your freewriting, or as you work your way through a business day, you’ll come across words whose definitions seem taken for granted, words that are used as a way to stop thinking rather than start it. These are the words to pay attention to.