In a thought-provoking episode of Transform Your Workplace, host Brandon Laws sits down with linguistic anthropologist Dr. Suzanne Wertheim to discuss the importance of evolving with our ever-changing language. Dr. Wertheim introduces her “carrot and stick” approach, encouraging listeners to stay up-to-date with language as a way to be both kind and socially aware. To guide respectful communication, she emphasizes that context is key and offers principles rather than rigid lists. Dr. Wertheim’s insights, including her six principles of inclusive language, provide listeners with practical tools to avoid painful mistakes and engage in meaningful conversations. This episode is essential for anyone striving to communicate effectively in today’s dynamic world.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Dr. Suzanne Wertheim is a consultant, keynote speaker, and author of The Inclusive Language Field Guide. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Berkeley.
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🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
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CARROT AND STICK
There’s no question that language is ever-evolving, and according to our guest, we must evolve with it. Dr. Suzanne Wertheim, a linguistic anthropologist, began the conversation with a unique take: a “carrot and stick” approach to language. She explained, “The carrot is, don’t you want to be up to date? I know you’re a good person with good intentions. Don’t you want to have your words work for you?” The “stick” part is a reminder of how easily anything we say can be scrutinized online. “People can screenshot your text message… it’s so quick for the internet to come and judge you.”
Dr. Wertheim shared that, often, tech professionals want a simple list of words to either use or avoid. But when it comes to the commitment to change, it’s so much more than just adhering to a list. After all, context is everything and language guidelines can change. Instead of a fixed list, she offers principles that act as guardrails. “They’re a way for you to judge your own language and do them like a pilot safety checklist,” she says. These principles help ensure safe and respectful conversations, providing a structured way to evaluate potentially problematic words.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Teaching vs. Labeling
“I’m never saying to people, ‘That’s racist. That’s homophobic. That’s sexist.’ When you say things like that to somebody, they shut down, they get defensive. They feel attacked. Your body floods with stress chemicals. […] You can’t learn. It’s not an incentive to change behavior. But if you say, ‘Oh, this word that you used actually erases people. You might not know that, but let me give you an example of how. You think you’re reflecting everybody, but you’re not actually pointing to everybody. You’re erasing some people,’ then people feel like it’s accessible. Like ‘Oh, it’s not that I’m a jerk. It’s just this word had baggage that I didn’t expect, and I’m going to shift over to a new way of talking.’”
Language and Retention
“I’ve been brought in to do so many employee experience interviews, either while people are still at a company or sometimes companies are like, ‘Oh, we’re hemorrhaging people that I don’t think we should be hemorrhaging. We keep on losing women, we lose people of color, or any combination of that.’ So I’ll go and I’ll do a post-exit interview — I think we all know that exit interviews often don’t actually give you the information that you need as to why somebody left. But if you bring in an intermediary who can interview people professionally and then hide who they are in disguise, some of the things, and then report back to a company and say, ‘Here are some pain points.
Here’s a leaky bucket. You got to plug it.’ A lot of the times what I was finding was that it was language.”
Six Language Principles
“So my six principles — which are applied to all languages and all cultures that I found, and they’re designed to be universal — are that inclusive language reflects reality, shows respect, draws people in, incorporates other perspectives, prevents erasure, and recognizes pain points. And that’s it. I think everybody, if you hear that, you’re like, ‘Well, yeah, that’s how I want people to speak to me. It’s as basic as that.”
Language as Fungus
“For a long time, people thought that you could study language in isolation. People who study fungus felt like they could pick up a mushroom and study it in a lab and learn things. But it turns out that recent scientific research says what’s amazing about fungus is that all the stuff that you don’t see, these incredibly tangled roots, talk to other funguses, talk to trees. I mean, there are fungi that connect trees and when the fungus disappears, then the forest doesn’t do so well.”
“So words are like that too. Dictionaries try to give you a little bit of context. They give you those example sentences, right? But they don’t give you enough context. And what I’m saying is if you don’t have an understanding of the context and why a word might be okay for one group of people and not okay for another group of people, or it might be okay for one person to say in a certain situation and not another situation, it doesn’t work. So you have to move past the dictionary and say, ‘I got to learn more about context,’ and that’s where those dimensions of identity start to come in.”
Extra Work for Leaders
“But there’s this thing in American speech and many other places where if you are reporting up to somebody, you don’t feel allowed to be direct with them. You can’t say to them, ‘No, that doesn’t work,’ or ‘I disagree,’ or —[…] where if somebody expresses dissent and they are a woman of color, a man of color, a perceptively disabled person, and they say, ‘Oh, I think this is a mistake. We should fix it,’ people get angry at them for calling out the problem. So there’s this problem that leaders have where they have to do everything, extra work, to make it safe for people to talk to them. They have to do extra work to draw people in and make sure that they heard that they’re heard. They have to do extra work to make sure that they are respectful of other people’s opinions and people fall into these traps so often.”
A Commitment to Change
“One thing that I’m going to suggest to your listeners, to you, is to commit to doing a little bit every week. Just like you develop muscles a little bit, I can’t go out and run a marathon. I don’t know that I could ever run a marathon. I’m very short and I’m all torso, so that’s probably not going to work, but I have been a person who got into shape.
I’ve been a person who’s biked a lot, hiked a lot, done stuff. Did I start with a 13-mile, 2000-elevation chain hike? No, I started small, and I built it up a little bit over time. […] That’s how you do it. And that’s why in the book, I don’t just give the quick wins, but I designed it so that you can do it every month. The book is secretly a six-month course.”
LEARN MORE
Grab your own copy of Dr. Wertheim’s book, The Inclusive Language Field Guide, on Amazon or wherever books are sold.