Today, we’re going to learn about a Grice’s Maxims of Cooperative Speech

* Every message has two layers: what’s said, and what’s meant on top of it. The second does most of the work.

* The maxims aren’t rules for speaking. They’re assumptions you run while listening — and meaning appears when someone breaks one on purpose.

* Implicature isn’t “subtext.” It’s a specific claim you rebuild by inference, and rebuilding it is real work.

* That work isn’t shared evenly. Cooperation assumes equals; most consequential talk isn’t between equals.

* AI breaks the maxims differently — fluent surface, missing uncertainty markers, no way to answer only what was literally asked.

You’re going to want to share this with your work bestie

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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Someone tells you, calmly, that they’re giving you your time back. Someone else, mid-story, asks: “can I stop you there?” A third person, cornered on a specific and documented harm, tells you it wasn’t their intention. A fourth hedges an idea they’ve been sitting with for three weeks: “I might be wrong, but...”

Four different rooms. Four different speakers. Four sentences that sound, on the surface, like nothing at all — procedural, generous, careful, uncertain.

None of them are doing what they sound like they’re doing.

There’s a fifty-year-old framework that explains all four, and most people who use it correctly have never heard its name. It’s called politeness theory, and the first thing to understand about it is that it has almost nothing to do with manners.

We’re looking at sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropolgy.

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You walk into an exam room.

The test is supposed to measure whether you can use English. The writing section: write a 250-word essay on “the advantages and disadvantages of online learning.” You have 30 minutes. Introduction, thesis statement, three body paragraphs, conclusion. Grammar correct. Vocabulary recognisable. Structure clear. Linear.

You write it. You score well. The test confirms it: you are “proficient.”

Three months later, you’re in a university classroom. A professor asks what you think about a reading. Your classmates interrupt mid-sentence, build on each other’s ideas, speak over the edges of sentences. You wait for your turn. You construct a thesis. By the time you finish your setup, the conversation has moved on.

Later, a colleague asks you for something you need to turn down. You give a clear, direct no, the way the test trained you to write and speak. Your colleague reads it as blunt. Something in the relationship breaks—but your accuracy is flawless.

The test never measured your capacity to do either of these things.

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