How Product Language Shapes the Gap Between Institution and User

The 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 thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribe [https://thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The 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 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/subscribe [https://thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The 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 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/subscribe [https://thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

How 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 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/subscribe [https://thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Tone Police and the Face-Threat Reversal

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com [https://thestrategiclinguist.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Speech 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.