The Strategic Linguist Podcast

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.



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“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/subscribe

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/subscribe

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/subscribe

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/subscribe