The Strategic Linguist Podcast

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


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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

Before I start, there are many, many posts that have most of my arguments already written. I am late to this party but I brought snacks now that the good food has been eaten.
I will spare you, and me, the need to repeat so I will stick closely to linguistics. I’ve also written at length about a lot of what is here, so if you’re new know that what is in here sits in my other 100 posts and if you’re not new here, you’ll see the same frameworks applied to a new use case.
I’ve written recently about how linguistic imperialism impacts non-native speakers. While I won’t be using that argument here, this argument includes anyone who uses tools to help them write: a dictionary, a thesauraus, spell check, a LLM.
You do not have to be a non-native English speaker to need the use of tools to write and put your ideas on paper. LLMs didn’t change that.



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

The Currency You're Born With
What Bourdieu discovered about language as capital
Two equally qualified candidates sit the same interview. Only one of them was born speaking the accent the panel already trusts.
This episode is about what Pierre Bourdieu called linguistic capital — language as an inherited asset that converts into hiring decisions, promotions, and credibility, whether or not anyone in the room ever calls it capital at all.
What's covered:
Why linguistic capital is inherited rather than earned, and why it only works while it stays invisible
The trap of personal explanation: why "more polished" or "just has presence" is always the wrong level of explanation — the variable doing the work is positional, not personal
Why medical and legal jargon isn't automatically exclusion, and the real distinction between a register built for precision and one that's become a price of entry
How the same linguistic capital converts at different rates depending on who's spending it, and what seniority, race, class, and gender have to do with who set the standard in the first place
Where Bourdieu's ideas of legitimate language and symbolic violence come from, and why IELTS is the clearest live example of both
What Michel Foucault adds: the test doesn't just measure competence, it manufactures the category


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