Werthwhile Language

Carrie and Megan talk with Dr Suzanne Wertheim about her book, The Inclusive Language Field Guide: 6 Simple Principles for Avoiding Painful Mistakes and Communicating Respectfully.

• pentl'atch named a living language

Chapters

• 5:59 Interview with Suzanne

Transcript

Carrie Gillon: Hi, and welcome to the Book of Fries podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. 

Megan Figueroa: Hi, I'm Megan Figueroa.  

Carrie: I'm Carrie Gillon. 

Megan: Hey, it's actually cold here today. 

Carrie: Oh, really?  

Megan: Yeah, we're actually experiencing some winter. By that, I mean, it's going to be 68 degrees. 

Carrie: That's not winter, not even for there. That's like.... 

Megan: I know. Well, though, tell that to my body Carrie. I'm pretty cold, but no, it's unseasonally warm here. I'm trying to pretend like it's winter, but it's climate change. 

Carrie: I mean, 60 it's lovely. 

Megan: It's beautiful. No, I'm not complaining about the weather. I mean, we're going to have like in the mid 70s, like all week. That's beautiful, but it's unseasonally warm and it's not normal. Even beauty can be bad. That's my wisdom, I guess. How are you doing? 

Carrie: Yeah, good. It's kind of gray today, but to be expected. Starting to finally get rain again, which is good for the ecosystem. Kind of bad for the morale. I was reminded, I did post about it, but I don't think many people saw this, but I was reminded that some of our former guests have had kind of a victory. 

Megan: I love hearing that. Which of our former guests? 

Carrie: Our Pentlutch guests, Chief Michael Rackama Etal. They have gotten the government of BC to declare Pentlutch a living language. 

Megan: Oh my God, that's so beautiful. That's fantastic. How does that work? Do you know how that works? 

Carrie: Well, no, I've never been a part of anything like this. I mean, Sue Urbánczak, who is also on that episode, the linguist involved. She mentioned when I was congratulating her on it that it was a lot of paperwork. 

Megan: Okay. It's still a bureaucracy. It's a bureaucratic situation here. 

Carrie: Of course. 

Megan: A lot of paperwork. I guess I should have expected that to be the path to getting anything by the government declared or done. 

Carrie: Yeah. This sentence is kind of funny. This is from CBC News. The reclassification of Pentlutch was the result of both linguistic and administrative work by the Qualicum First Nation. Someone has to do a lot of admin work now. 

Megan: Yeah. What was their classification before? 

Carrie: Well, it was considered extinct because the last known speaker died in the 40s. 

Megan: Technically, like the actual technical term was the classification of extinct. 

Carrie: Yeah that's the term that was used. Yes. 

Megan: Now it's living. 

Carrie: Now it's back to living. 

Megan: Wow. Are there any other classifications that the government has? 

Carrie: No. What other would there be? 

Megan: I don't know. Because I know that extinct is not something that the community is like. 

Carrie: No. But if we're talking in terms of like official terms, no, there's only those two. If you're talking about like the gradient of endangerment, there are many different terms. 

Megan: But that's a great victory. That's amazing. 

Carrie: So one of the reasons why this really matters besides the fact that calling it extinct is not nice. People don't like it. Is that you couldn't apply for grants for it. 

Megan: Oh, so now they're going to apply for government grants? 

Carrie: Yeah. I did notice actually that it was added to the grant portal and I was like, oh, cool. 

Megan: That's really cool. 

Carrie: But that was before it was announced. I didn't realize that was why I just was like, oh, that's cool that that's there. 

Megan: Yeah. That's huge. 

Carrie: Yeah. It's really cool. 

Megan: That's really cool. That's some really like feel good news. 

Carrie: Yes. It really is. 

Megan: That is. Well, I'm so glad to hear that and congratulations to everyone that put effort into that. I know it's a lot linguistically and administratively to do. 

Carrie: Yes. I mean, they probably did a lot more work linguistically because there was a 10 years worth of work before the list. But still the administrative work needs to be acknowledged because I know how much of pain in the ass that is. 

Megan: It is. Yeah. So many things don't get done because of that last bit of like bureaucracy. 

Carrie: Yeah. I know how like boring it is and how much you just don't want to do it. Congratulations to everybody involved and I can't wait to hear more. 

Megan: Yeah. Absolutely. We have a good episode today. 

Carrie: Yeah, we do. As always. 

Megan: As always. It's always fun to learn from other people. We'll always say that we have a fun episode for you. 

Carrie: That is true. But I think our guest was especially lively. 

Megan: Yes, absolutely. 

Carrie: You know her?

Megan: I do. Yes, we hope that you enjoy. Today we are so excited to welcome Dr. Suzanne Wertheim, an inclusive language expert, speaker and author. After getting her PhD in linguistics from Berkeley, Dr. Wertheim held faculty positions at Northwestern University of Maryland, UCLA. In 2011, she left the university system in order to apply her expertise to real world problems. She now runs worthwhile research and consulting, which specializes in analyzing and addressing bias at work. 
She's also the author of the inclusive language field guide, six simple principles for avoiding painful mistakes and communicating respectfully, which we are so excited to have her on the show today to talk about. Thank you for being here. 

Carrie: Yeah, thank you.

Suzanne Wertheim: Thank you so much for having me. I have to say that subtitle really was for SEO only. 

Megan: Oh, was it? 

Suzanne: I didn't really expect people to read it. I didn't even want it on the cover. I'm like, oh, please it's literally just for people typing. But no, I'm very happy to have it. I mean, like literally it is this core of the book, but I'm just like, it's such a fricking long time. 

Megan: But it's important stuff. We just want to start off with asking you, why did you want to write this book and why now? 

Suzanne: Actually, now is late. I tried to get this book out for years. I wanted to write this book for two reasons. When was that people literally asked me. I've got client stakeholders and one of the things is, and we were talking about this in the lead up to turning on the recording. 

When I had students for 12 weeks at a time or 15 weeks at a time, I almost only taught in quarters. I could really do paradigm shifting for how people saw the world and I could really on ramp some basic foundational principles of whatever you want to call it, linguistic anthropology, social linguistics. I'll call it a contextualized language use. To the point where undergrads were emailing me years after taking one intro class and being like, well, I'm in Italy and I've been thinking about Dr. Tinian Heteroglossia. I'm like looking through student rosters. I'm like, you took my class like four years ago and it was a 300 person class. I knew things were sticking, but things weren't sticking enough in my transition to going in and facilitating workshops or workshop series. Now I get people for two hours at a time if I'm lucky, very often it's one hour at a time. 

We all know how much effort and thinking it takes to shift language practice and language perception. I realized that people, I was coming in and giving a workshop, but it wasn't enough and people were saying to me, I need to leave behind for my recruiters because they keep on messing up and misgendering people and driving my candidates. I need to leave behind for my executives and I needed it to be an audio book because they're not reading physical books anymore. I need to leave behind. 

Basically how could I be in a place without my being physically there? The only answer was the book. Part two is I was so frustrated at what was happening within families of transgender and non-binary kids where I would see it with people close to me. Just I would read stories where a person who was younger would come out as transgender non-binary and then older people in the family. I was like, I need a book that people can hand to, let's just say, I'm going to be maybe [inaudible], but hand to a grandparent and say, you can't call them, oh, I almost used my cousin's names. You can't call them Isabella anymore. Now they're back[?] Then just the basics.  literally wrote the book so that you can hand it to someone and say, you only have to read a chapter three. I literally front loaded everything. It's a book for family members of newly out trans and non-binary family members. Then it took a long time to get it out there in the world. 

Carrie: We understand that. 

Megan: Yeah, we definitely understand that. You have so much in the beginning and so that was on purpose. Like there's so much knowledge in your first even 20 pages. 

Suzanne: Oh, yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Is there anything in particular that struck you because I worked very hard to make this very readable for people who are coming from a zero starting point and possibly a negative start. Everything is designed to be on ramping people. It's designed to have people feel compelled to read. 

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. 

Suzanne: But maybe you're just seeing through to the foundations of what I'm doing rather than my gentle on ramping of people who might not be seeing. 

Megan: Well, I was struck and it's one of the questions that I have. You write that there is a new 21st century etiquette and that really struck me. How does this defer from some of the ways that we may have been taught to be polite when we were growing up? 

Suzanne: Oh, yeah. Well, you gotta front load some stuff. I mean, the intro is why are you here reading this book. It's sort of the premise and arguing for the value of continuing reading. I'll tell you that since I was a wee grad student teaching elite students as a teaching assistant at Berkeley, so teaching elite students, I cared about pedagogy. I was never trained in pedagogy, but I cared about it. 

My mom was an elementary school teacher. Maybe it's in the blood. But I noticed from the earliest stages, resistance, body language, first off that I thought was just science. I would be presenting, what a professor. I'm like, oh, here's a supplemental article. Let me teach you about it. I would see resistance body language. For a very long time, I've been like, well, this is just literally the facts of the world. 

You get anybody with a toolkit analyzing and they're going to come up with the same analysis. How can I get resistant people to do it? For 25 years, I've been working on how do you bypass resistance and what are sort of common sense framings that people can hang on. Etiquette is one of those framings. I fling them up against the wall and LinkedIn posts or in workshops or in panels or conversations and I see what sticks. Etiquette is a good sticky one, is a sticky one. What I say to people, I just said it on a podcast the other day with salespeople who are speaking and coming from a zero or a negative start point. 

Sales reps tend to be coming from a resistant place for this kind of material. I'm like, today's etiquette is the same as earlier etiquette. The only thing that shifted is when I was younger, it was considered acceptable to exclude or be rude to or disrespectful of all kinds of people. The only shift is like the rules of politeness are the same. Just now we're like, "Hey, you can't be rude to that kind of person." 

We're just saying there's an accountability and a broader range of who the etiquette applies to. When you say something like that, the salesperson that was interviewing me, he kept on saying after I would say stuff, he would say, "Oh, that makes sense." Like that was his go to response. He would be nodding a lot and I was like thumbs up being internally. 

Carrie: That's interesting because you also talk about professionalism. To me, etiquette is related to professionalism. Yeah, you're trying to like hijack their ideas of what it is to be like a good salesperson or professional by using the word etiquette. I love that. 

Suzanne: Well, and I'll say for professional, so we're linguists here. I think professional is a very under specified term. 

Carrie: True. 

Megan: There are like executive presence is another one. There are a few that I go through.  I talk about that with people and so in workshops, I explain to people, how can you bypass bias? I tell people you've got to be external, granular and regular. For example, for a hiring process or promotion process. You can't think in your head, Oh, she's so articulate or oh, that he's got executive presence or oh, he really has a solid background." What is a solid background? What is executive presence? What is articulate? 

You have to actually be very specific. If you make it external, so you put it down on not a piece of paper anymore, but a computerized object. a whole group of people are making a decision can see it and you make it granular so you go below under specified to very specific components and then you make it regular so you apply it regularly. I make it sound very simple. In practice applying this is actually quite difficult. But for me, that's the kind of etiquette that I'm talking about. I'm like, let's be specific about what etiquette is. That's my six principles. I mean, the six principles are secretly intro linguistic anthropology and my decades long analysis of what makes an interaction go well or not well for marginalized or oppressed people. But I'm framing it as etiquette and I'm framing it in a way that people should feel that they are aligned with. 

That's why I call my work anti bias work because I've seen a lot of people can be very dismissive. I'm in the heart of tech culture. Silicon Valley is also in in Oakland and in San Francisco. I'm soaking in what negative responses are. People will say, I'm building my startup. Inclusion is a nice to have we'll build it in later. Diversity is a nice to have. Is my engineering team all white guys or East Asian guys from Stanford? Sure. But I had to hire quickly and I had to hire the best. I hear what do people feel like it's okay? 

That's like a nice to have or not even a nice to have now. Like more openly like, I don't get that this is woke or PC, but it's hard for people with a semantic framing of bias. If I say, let's do some anti bias work who's going to come in on the side of bias? Everything I'm doing is jujitsu with semantic framing. Every single thing in the book is me testing what's working on resistant people and working very hard to convince them when I can't be in the room with them, trying to be charismatic and unthreatening. 

Megan: That's great. I'm just like amazed by how much thought goes into all of this. I mean, I shouldn't be surprised because it's a very thoughtful book. But just what you have to work with when it comes to resistant people because you want them to actually listen. That's really important for them to actually listen. 

Suzanne: I hired a developmental editor because I've worked as a developmental editor and so I know that I need it. One thing that she did was she kept on saying,  it's not saying it's in the margins, comments, but this feels like a linguistic digression. Like, do we really meet it? I'm like, so we would have our follow up conversation. I'm like, but it's such a cool fun fact that everyone will want to know. She's like, but is it? 

I worked very hard. Also, I paid good money to have somebody help me streamline. One of the tips that she gave me, which I already knew in some respects, but it's really amped up in the book again, because it's only words on a screen or words on a page. For the audible I'm reading it and so I can get more affect in there. Not audible, but general audio book. I don't want to promote a particular. 

Basically we work very hard. All of my chapters covering a principle of inclusive language start with a real world scenario. My database is so big, every day new data comes in for people speaking in a biased or writing in a biased way. Like it's not hard to collect the data. What's hard is to find a story that tugs on the heartstrings that people... She said, if you have people reading long enough, you can get their oxytocin to start releasing. 

Like you can actually trigger a chemical response that will engender more empathy. We've really worked on getting these stories. I mean, I had people read them and give me feedback. Then on a net galley or Good read, somebody said, "The examples, I can't get them out of my mind." I was at a friend's birthday party and she had her mom reading it and her mom said, "They're like a bullseye to the heart." I'm like, "All right. Thank you. Money well spent." 

Carrie: That's incredible. I love that. That's such a great tip for any authors out there. Let's ask a very basic question. What is inclusive language? 

Suzanne: Well, I'll give you a less basic answer than I give other people. Other people I say like for salespeople, I'll say inclusive language is language that makes people feel seen, heard and valued. It builds trust. It deepens relationship. It builds psychological safety. It makes people want to continue in a relationship with you. It's in contrast to what I call problematic language. That's another semantic framing. Inclusive versus problematic because I find that I have to avoid the language of social justice in order to on ramp[?] people who have been polarized by social media in the world. 

I go granular and very basic so people have a hard time arguing. Well, I was going to say, I want to use problematic language. Problematic language is language that does the reverse. It makes people feel excluded like you've forgotten about them. 
Like they haven't been taken in consideration that you're not respectful of them. It lowers trust. It lowers safety. It harms relationships. Especially if you're at the beginning point of a relationship and I usually talk about business relationships because business people are the ones who pay me. But this counts for all relationships like dating. 

You know what a first date is like for people who have been on one. There's a lot of evaluation. Well, the same thing is true for a candidate for a job or a prospect and a sales call or somebody reading your first marketing materials or looking at your website. The evaluation filter is on very high. Is this someone that I want to be aligned with? Is this a company that sees me and respects me and wants to be with me or wants me to feel taken care of or wants to actually take care of me? Problematic language signals to people, no, for people who are in the groups that are being treated disrespectfully or marginalized. They'll very often cut off that relationship in the earliest phases. 

For linguists, I will say inclusive language is a set of behavioral principles that are aligned with what I've seen cross-culturally and cross-linguistically, part of interactional behavior or communication events that end up with positive in grouping or positive end results. However, you want to measure it. 

Megan: Well, and you've done a lot of fieldwork so you've seen this across different cultures and communities. 

Suzanne: I mean, I gave a talk in 2011 a couple of times where I compared the language practices of Tatar nationalists in Russia. Tatar is the largest ethnic minority and the largest minority language in Russia. It's a Turkic language. Until 1552, the Tatars were on top. Then Ivan the Terrible came and attacked them. The symbol of Russia, that cathedral in Red Square is the cathedral that was built to commemorate the defeat of the Tatars. Tatars are like the very thing. The symbol of Russia is for the people I did fieldwork with, the sign of their defeat. Anyway, there were ways that Tatars were using language that when I was doing fieldwork with comedians in LA, I was going to write a book about comedy and comedic practices because comedians are manipulating language to move the world to a better place. 

Basically, I would give this talk comparing practices for these Tatar nationalists in Russia who wanted their own Tatar state, which the Bolsheviks promised them in the 19 teens. Present day LA comedians, I was like, why do they feel the same? The answer was that there was this thing called Weltschmerz. Leave it to the Germans to have a great word. World pain and specifically the way some people use world pain is the pain that comes from seeing the gap between the world, the way it's supposed to be and the world, the way it currently is. That's really what informs my work. I feel that very deeply. I think this podcast comes from that too.

What is this pain that you feel that puts you into action? I've done a lot of fieldwork and the thing is that it's been so disparate and yet when you see the common threads, you're like, well, that's got to be something that's genuinely cross cultural. If these monolingual, cis white, comedian dudes in LA are doing stuff that I saw with these multilingual, super oppressed under early Putin, secretly spying on the mosque. They had something important to tell me we would walk on a bridge. Like literally, I was like, am I in a spy movie? I'm literally just doing dissertation fieldwork and people like, oh, I'll tell you that story let's go for a walk. 

Then when we were on the bridge, they would tell me because they knew that nothing could reach them. I these people from super not oppressed groups and super oppressed groups were having the same kinds of reactions to this world pain, it felt to me that there was something to look at. I draw that into the book because the book is meant to be a fix for the world should be. We are using our language to express respect. 

Carrie: That's amazing. I love that that you can find it in very disparate cultures. I'm not that surprised, but yeah, I always love it when we see these connections. Why is it important to get someone's name right? 

Suzanne: Oh my goodness. It's important in 800 ways. It's funny because people are like, "Well, what's one of the first things I should do?" I'm like names, put some respect on names. People feel like it's too basic. But the list of problems that I have of the ways that people's names are disrespected is so long. 

I have so many ways that I can do it. One is the basics for speakers of oral languages. When you encounter low frequency names, put in the effort to pronounce them correctly and for anybody put in the effort to spell them correctly. Low frequency names can be names like mine. I was born in the peak year for my name, Suzanne, but it's been downhill ever since and now young people don't even know like Suzanne Summers or Suzanne Pluchette. I used to be able to point to famous people and be like them. Now, there's nobody. I get called Susan a lot. Then people with lower frequency names or names that have an origin, not in English, a lot of people just give up. 

There's the disrespect. I have people who I'll just tell you I've been thinking a lot and talking a lot with companies and whatever consumer experience, customer experience teams. Forms as basic as forms, people who program forms don't take into account the variability of names. There's no room for diacritics, so what if the diacritic is really important? 

There's so many people in the U.S., like people whose parents were up in what was called Yugoslavia, whose names aren't pronounced well because the diacritics went away. Now it's a sa or a ka instead of a sha or a cha. There's so many things that went away. No diacritics. People with two letter last names tell me that they can't fill out a form because the form says the family name can't be only two letters because they think they're being spoofed.

So an Ng or an Au. I'll just bring up my fantastic colleague, Jenna Barkas-Lichtinstein, does not have a great time with forms. That's her full last name. I met somebody with an even longer last name and she showed me her driver's license. Her name just cuts off. Her official ID, she's missing half of one of her family names, like it's gone. Or there's somebody who's a friend's friend who I've met once and her name is Chinese. She was born in China and raised partly here and her name has a white space in it. It's two parts. I have a tab open on Twitter. It hasn't gone in my database yet because I'm so busy, but I have her formerly Twitter account up where she shows screenshots. She's like, "Hey, famous bookstore. I'm getting an error message. Like I'm trying to put my name. Let's say her name is Meng Lao. 

I don't like to use people's real names. Let's say her name is Meng Lao. It's parallel to Meng Lao. It's Meng Lapo. There's no white space allowed in names or she'll get sales pitches or whatever. Hey, Meng. She's like, I'm not giving you money. If you can't have the most basic respect. Another one is in the book I talk about, this is a Reddit thing where somebody's name was Tina and she's black, was the only black person at her workplace. She wrote on Reddit. 

There were so many answers, Reddit. But she was like, I've been at this company a year and people literally will not say my name right. Her name was Christina. She went by Tina, which is an unmarked, a regular name, but she was marked because she was black. They would call her in particular, Tiana, which is the name of a Disney heroine who has also has dark skin. She was like, what am I going to do? Like, I'm thinking about saying, like, if Charles says, Hey, Tiana, I'm thinking about calling him Chad. If Jennifer calls me, I'm thinking about calling him Jessica and Reddit was like, do it and more. But I unpack in the book. 

That story is in the book. I'm like, what's the message she's being told? The message is, I don't care about you. I don't care about you enough to even say your name right. Not only do I not care about you, but I relentlessly see you as the other. You are always going to be the other to me. I don't care about getting your name right in a way that shows that I only think of you as the exotic other. I mean, those are just a few examples. There's so many more. 

Carrie: Speaking of exotic, why is that a problematic word? 

Suzanne: I mean, have we lived it off everyone on this call? Have we all had exotic? 

Carrie: Yes, absolutely. 

Suzanne: Exotic is my parade example to illustrate Bactinian flavor to people. What I've learned is that flavor, people pick it up in two minutes, and then it stays with them. That is of all the linguistic concepts that people can use to ramp up their perspective, taking skills of their empathy skills. Flavor is number one. When I say exotic, there's always people who get it and people who don't write away. Bactinian flavor is for people who haven't been lucky enough to be exposed to the work of Bactin. Super useful stuff. If you didn't grow up with a native [inaudible] like me, I always like to give permission. You can use a K and say Bactin, it's okay. I just have to say Bactin because I speak Russian. Bactin said that no words are neutral and objective and just out there. 

I can't believe he figured this out by analyzing Russian novels. But no words are just neutral and out there. They're not like this universal standard resource, like a plain cardboard box that you pull and you put your meaning into it. In fact, a word acquires a flavor every single time we encounter it. It acquires the flavor over time based on how people said or the context. For example, the flavor for many people in this country of their full name being said by a parent is, my parent is angry at me. 

That's the flavor. I don't have a middle name, so I can't use it. My dad liked to say, we were too poor. We were too poor at the time. They were not that poor. Anyway, the idea is that the flavor of exotic is different depending on your life experience encountering it. For many people, exotic is not for a word that's been used to describe them. It only describes places or foods or clothing that's far away. 

It's lightly positive. Oh, it's exotic. Exotic is a compliment for them. Oh, it's so exotic. But for many people in this country who are female and don't look white, this word has been used in a problematic way, an othering way. It has the flavor of creepy sexualization when it's inappropriate. Nothing wrong with sexualization when it's appropriate, but in this case, inappropriate sexualization and the feeling of othering at a time that you felt like you were being there as a person, your focus is on how you fit in. 

Then you suddenly realize that just like Tina just wants to be called Tina and Tiana is this constant ongoing message that says the message of the how her name is being said is, I see you as the other. Well, exotic is the same. It can feel very unpleasant and inappropriate. But it's for me the great example when I say to people for whom exotic has a good flavor, you really can't call other people exotic.

Exotic is fine for places, things, cuisines, clothes, but not for a person. They're like, but I wouldn't mind if someone said it to me. This is what the book is reverse engineered. But I wouldn't mind if someone said it to me, literally, the whole book is an argument against that reaction. My point is, well, the flavor for you is good of exotic, but the flavor for the person complaining, it's not good. Then I'll have breakout groups sometimes in workshops, is there's something that people try to convince you tastes good, has a good flavor, and that isn't good. I always get cilantro or there's a song people like that somebody else hates, everybody knows what it's like to be told, you should enjoy this thing, but you don't enjoy it. I'm like, well, let's just apply that concept to things like words. 

Megan: Articulate would be another good example of this. 

Suzanne: Articulate comes with that flavor of being presumed incompetent and all of those language ideologies of deficit when it comes to language varieties associated with darker skinned people.  

Megan: That goes back to some people, maybe white people would say, but I would love to be called articulate. Well, it has a different flavor for you. 

Suzanne: I co ran a series pre pandemic. Then since the pandemic, nobody's bought it, interestingly. But a series called More Than Words, which I co run with my colleague, Stacey Parsons, who is black and female and queer. We co run this thing and it involves a lot of... I don't like role play, but she does. Sometimes we'll be, I'm like, oh my God, like for me, I really actually extremely dislike role play. 

Carrie: Me too. 

Megan: Yeah, me too. 

Suzanne: I'm going to say frankly, I think it's because of Goffman's speaker roles. Like, I don't want to animate somebody else's words or pretend to have somebody else's stance or pretend that I can speak in a way that somebody else's way. I don't like to have things based on false hood. I'd rather have people just like analyze a real scenario. But so we would have people role play. But so we began one at a very techie company filled with very resistant people, a lot of white engineers. We talked about articulate. We talked about the difference between when somebody calls Stacey articulate and sometimes Stacey's been called articulate in a way that she knows is a compliment. 

They'll say, "Oh, you were so articulate. The way that you described it, I never thought of it that way. You explained everything so clearly." Like articulate isn't necessarily an insult. But when you say to a black person, "Oh, you're so articulate", so often not you, but a person says that. Often what goes unspoken is part two, which is for a black person. When I've been called articulate, it's always been clearly complimentary.

That's the difference. What I've learned from again, fieldwork, just talking to a lot of people and collecting data from them is that it's a two parter for black people. The first is a disbelief that they're educated. The second is a disbelief that they can control the standard language variety. It's nothing about the actual quality of their performance. It's about a starting assumption of deficit and incompetence. 

Megan: What are some of the other ways language in the workplace is excluding historically marginalized communities? 

Suzanne: Short list. 

Megan: You can count on one hand, it's just so easy. 

Suzanne: There are a lot of things like my six principles of inclusive language, which I probably should list them at some point. I'm okay not doing it now. But my six principles are very basic to understand. Then once you start implementing them, it's like the trapdoor that keeps on falling. Like you keep on falling down into the nuances. Like I used to teach this grad seminar basically on context. Each week I'm like, let's go one down, we just kept on falling down deep. I'm like, now let's unpack. You thought this thing was atomic. Well, let's go subatomic. Let's talk about gender specific language and male words that are used. I mean, genuinely, it's so basic. If you're like, oh man, okay. Or guys, guys is a big one. 

Let's talk about guys. But before that, let me say my framing statement, which is people consciously, not all of them, but many of them accept that a word like mankind or manmade does not accurately reflect the reality of what was going on. Words point to the world and when you have a male specific word, sometimes it is also pointing to male people. 

How many man hours do we need for this project is one that happens. Or the car was unmanned or the unmanned mission or all of these things. On the one hand, it might be an all male stuff. How many man hours might be appropriate, but chances are excellent that it's not especially because so many people during the pandemic had a chance to get in touch with gender identities that are not what they were assigned at birth. We've got an uptick of people who are saying, actually, I'm non-binary or non-binary[?] or whatever term they want to use, but it means that they're not either male or female, regardless of what people will assess from their gender presentation.

You can't just look at a group of people and make an assumption. The actual eradication of male specific words, masculine words, seems to be beyond like a snail is moving quicker. I've seen snails that move much quicker than people working and genuinely trying to eradicate male specific terminology, because it's that difference. I think it's this a great example of that difference between what our conscious minds believe and the linguistic patterns that we use that then reflect and reinforce something very much opposed to. Our older, more retrograde, more biased language patterns reinforce and replicate these biased ways of being, even if our conscious mind says, yeah, there's more than just men involved. I think I got a lot of resistance to is guys. 

I've got people who are like, for example, male managers, multiple male managers have said, but when I'm talking to my team, I just say, hi guys and hey guys and you guys and they know what means everybody. I'm like, but does it? Like, but really? I give some semantic heuristics for guys that people love. When I'm delivering bad news, I like to couch it in ways that are very palatable. 

I just give this keynote and I use Disney Princess data for talk time. Then I give these semantic heuristics for guys. One example is I'm going to a bathroom in a restaurant and it's always that back hallway. I'm assigned female at birth and I am female. That affects the bathroom that I choose and the evaluation I make when I'm walking by a bathroom door. If I walk by a door that says guys in that back hallway, do I say, oh, gender inclusive bathroom? Yes and I walk in. I'm like, because I really got to pee. Absolutely not. 

I keep on walking down that hallway. I use these very common sense heuristics or another one that people like is I say, okay, I've got a friend. I know he's straight. He's moved back to my town and it's hard to date. There aren't that many young people in the town so I say to him, hey, how many guys have you managed to date since you came back to town? 

I know it's hard to find people to date here. I'm like, is that a normal thing to say to a straight man? Like, no, we know that that's marked as unusual and I'd be making some kind of point. I'm like, so there are all these heuristics that show us and I give heuristics for the word nerds who like to bring away a term. Then I say test. I'll intersperse the basic word and the linguistic term. I'm trying to meet all the different starting points in the audience. Then that convinces people pretty quickly. But then the actual eradication of guys takes a lot of practice. 

Carrie: Well, I would say for guys, especially with you guys, because it's part of a pronoun, I think that's really hard. Whereas like guys as a noun referring to a group of people, just by itself, I think probably is easier for people to just replace the noun. But I find the pronoun harder. 

Suzanne: I did not expect to do this, let's get into a core finding of my 2003 dissertation on Tatar Russian contact and contact induced change. The Tatar's I was working with, all I wanted them to do was code switch for my tape recorder. 

Carrie: [crosstalk] Plus Russia was not at the forefront so I had to make sure that I could get replaceable parts and I had to be at Russian level stuff. Nobody would code switch, nobody would code switch. Instead, they would have this very precise Tatar. It took me a long time to understand that there was this range of language mixing that people would use and they would be performing a different kind of identity for a different circumstance. There was this one that I called Tatar preferred. If you spoke all Tatar with no Russian in it, you sounded like a granny or a village person, like a Rube. The flavor, the indexicality was not what young college students, I was working with college students. 

College students in the big city, it's the ninth biggest city in Russia, it's got over a million people in it. They didn't want to sound like a Rube. They would use Tatar style that had just some Russian words in it. Those words actually formed a natural class that I ended up calling discourse pragmatic words. They were all words that organized or commented on the language. You could see them as sort of a stream above the language. People didn't recognize that they were putting those words in. 

They flew under the radar somehow. Even people thinking that they were being puristic in their speech, it would come in. This was how I was finding morphosyntactic change, because there were some words like shunki, like if you said put a moustache because instead of Tatar Shunki, which is secretly Persian, it would rearrange the entire syntax of your sentence. 

One word could come with all of these syntactic entailments that were really different. I would say that both hey guys and you guys, but you guys even more is very much a discourse pragmatic function that's trying to organize and saying, "I'm addressing you people." This is the kind of stuff that was slipping under the radar for people who were so careful about how they were speaking in front of me, the field worker, the foreigner from a high-precision place where you want to be your best Tatar person in front of this person because she's documenting you and God only knows who's going to read this stuff and still these words would slip through. You never know where your linguistic research is going to show up. I don't talk about discourse pragmatic words and how easy they are. But if you listen to people who are barely code switching, the majority language words that are coming in are usually going to be discourse pragmatic words. When I would eavesdrop a lot of people speaking [inaudible] and then Zapotec languages on LA buses that I would take to teach at UCLA and then you would hear English come in. I couldn't understand anything, but I could understand the English or Spanish discourse pragmatic words that came in. I would say real cognitive and linguistic principles, why the eradication of some of these problematic things is genuinely difficult. 

Megan: Yeah. We're going to fuck up sometimes, right? 

Suzanne: Absolutely. What you can do is not over apologize. I would say for pronouns, what I tell people because I've had trans readers of my book and trans people giving me feedback and data. They say that the over apology is just as othering as the misgender. 

Megan: Yes. I've heard that. Absolutely. 

Carrie: We've heard that as well on this very show. 

Megan: On this show, yeah. 

Suzanne: I believe it. 

Megan: You said you're going to talk about the six principles. What are they? What are your six principles? 

Suzanne: It's so funny. I'm so excited to talk to people who I don't have to... Literally the last however many years of my life, 12 years. No, that's not true because I was doing NLP AI research for USC for a couple of years. But I've spent so many years trying to figure out how to rephrase things in a non-academic term. People are like, your book really isn't academic. Meanwhile, Megan, you look at my book and you're like, in the first 20 pages, there's so much stuff. I'm like, yes, because you can see through to this stuff. But I'm working so hard. The principles are framed very basically, but they really come from very extensive cross-linguistic and cross-cultural analysis. I'm so happy to talk to you all using real terminology. 

My native analytical terminology, which I'm always translating for other people. The six principles are reflect reality and there's a reason why I have that as number one. Reflect reality, show respect, draw people in, incorporate other perspectives, prevent erasure, and recognize pain points.

Megan: It all seems so simple.

Suzanne: It's so simple till you start actually getting deep into the weeds of implementation and then people are like, uh-oh. 

Megan: I actually have to try here. There's some trying involved. 

Suzanne: But let me say that this is part of the on rapping[?] because the thing that happens again and again is when I talk to people who have mostly are all dominant group membership, they are freaked out at the amount of information that they don't have. I like to tell White Mill execs I work with that they have an unfortunate data deficit. I'm like, look, because you belong to all of these dominant group categories, you haven't had the data that I've had thrown at me since infancy. I'm technically white, but since the incubator, people thought I was Puerto Ricania because I was in an incubator in New York City, and for people who can't see me, which is all of you, I have tanned skin and dark hair and dark eyes and an ethnically ambiguous face. AI have a list of over 100 things people have thought that I am.  I get very racially or ethnically othered by white people who are like, what are you? 

Well, where are you from? I get in grouped by all different kind of tanned skin people. But anyway, I say to them, you have a data deficit because from infancy, I've had people treating me as if I'm not white and as if I'm not male. Gender bias, my brain was able to see, engage in the pattern recognition that brains are so good at. The pattern recognition that lets us learn languages and lets us understand things about the world and categorize and put value on the world, that pattern recognition comes from data. I'm like, y'all are at a data deficit because you haven't had the access to the data that I've had. 

When people start making lists of all the different kinds of people that they haven't had data access to for whatever reason, because the dominant narrative and the dominant stuff is what's been given to them and they haven't, for whatever reason, gone out to look for more, they freak out. That's why the principles are as simple as possible. It's one of the reasons why also I've organized this by principle and not identity. I'm just going to tell you without waiting for you to ask. Why did you organize this by principle and not identity? 

There are a few reasons. One is the simplicity where I'm trying to on-ramp people. Here are these six things and you want them for yourself. It's a ramped up empathy, but it's also at the simplicity of it. Another reason is if you have identity-based things, then words come and go, especially for stigmatized groups so you've got the cycle of federation. If people learn words and then they're gone, a few, I mean, just in my lifetime, the ethnonyms for people who are of African descent, I mean, probably five, maybe more, I expect more because that's what happens with stigmatized identities. The flavor goes downhill, becomes pejorative, and then you come up with a new word with a more neutral flavoring or positive flavoring. 

But what I also see since 2020, and I've been trying to get this book out there, but everyone and her sister wrote a book during the pandemic, so I couldn't get an agent. It took me forever. Their slush piles were so.... For me, getting a book deal to getting the book out was like 16 or 18 months. 

But I've been trying to get this out there. But I'm glad this happened as people in the DEI world call it post George Floyd. Because what that showed me was the incredible empathy deficit that is increasing because of all of this polarizing and dehumanizing constant stream of language and imagery that comes at people through all the reasons that we know for the modern world. There's this ramp up of dehumanization and polarizing language because it profits people, some people. I was like, well, if people don't care, if there's a whole chunk of people who literally don't care if Black people live or die because they're being shot in extrajudicial killings and murdered in other ways by police, or if there are people who genuinely don't care if people live or die because of refugee status, because of United States Central American problematic work that we've done. People genuinely don't care if people live or die. If people genuinely don't care about the health of indigenous people on an oil pipeline or disappearing indigenous women or native women, if people genuinely don't care about life or death, what's my argument for articulate going to be. You don't care if this Black person lives or dies. 

I'm like, oh, but it's impolite to say to somebody that they're articulate because you don't think well of them. They literally don't care if somebody lives or dies. For me, again, with the testing, with this empathy deficit, I found that behavioral principles are a far better starting point because then you can leverage the empathy and then you sneak people in and you've already onboarded them and then they're like, oh, I should apply this to these people too. 

Megan: Again, I'm just so impressed by how thoughtful this whole book is. Kite- 

Carrie: It's very thoughtful. Since you brought up Central America, I am not sad that a certain Kissinger is dead. 

Suzanne: Oh, don't name names. I mean, actually, I feel like an obligation. A linguistic distortion that I talk about in the book is softening language because I'm thinking about how can we start to call out for greater accountability? How can we call out when people with power are described in ways that present their absolutely unacceptable behavior as acceptable. There's this distortion that moves their behavior. I think Kissinger is a prime example. I feel obligated to write a little think piece and try to get it published on softening language used in Ula-Diz or discourse on Kissinger. But also, I'm trying to take time off for the end of the year. It's this big push-pull and I'm like, oh, do I have time? 

Can I try to write it by next Friday? Or is it going to go away? Because I think it's very dangerous. It's the same, speaking of Central Asia, Turkmenboshe died, the head of Turkmenistan. We here don't learn that much but people would come inspired by my work and be like, I want to go to Central Asia. I'm like, no, they're the top human rights violators. Like, no. Turkmenboshe died and I went like that hand, like, how do you describe the gesture I just did? 

Carrie: When you're done with kind of like washing your hands of them? 

Suzanne: Yeah. I was like, good, farewell. May you rest in hell or whatever. I don't have a strong cosmology. 

Carrie: No, me either. I'm just glad you're not around anymore. That's as far as I'll put it. 

Suzanne: Yeah, I agree. I'm coming in older than you all, I'm Gen X for American listeners. [inaudible] I came of age in the 80s. I have elements of hearing what a not good guy he was. I heard a lot more about what a bad person Jane Fonda was, and she was reflecting reality with her speech. 

Carrie: Oh my God. Yeah. Yes. 

Suzanne: But retrospectively, I mean, obviously, for me now, all the props to her, but retrospectively, people can look and be like, oh...

Carrie: Maybe what she was saying was right. 

Suzanne: Yeah. 

Carrie: Well, I would love to read that piece if you do end up writing it. I do not want to put any pressure on you though, because I understand we all need rest. 

Megan: But it sounds like an important piece. Very important piece. 

Suzanne: I'm desperate. But I mean, like my parallel example in the book is for people with power who are sexual assaulters. 

Carrie: Oh, I know. 

Suzanne: So what Mary K. LaTorneau died as I was writing the book. People said things like, I'm just scrolling through and I'm like, it's so nauseating, like for her inappropriate relationship with that. I recently gave a talk to a bunch of entrepreneurs in New York City with a range of political affiliations. That's part of the reason because the person who brought me and said, I want us people to talk about politics. I said, "Well, you can use my principles of inclusive language as guardrails." I'm like, I don't think it's a great idea but if you want to try, here are the principles. I was talking about stuff and I said, "I think that people in this room probably think they were all wait men. I think people in this room probably think that I'm sitting here in Oakland, I went to Berkeley", and you're like, she's going to be like pussyfoot around or domestic engineer or a softer way of saying things. I'm like, "No in my book if it's rape, you call it rape. I train journalists", and they're like, "Rape isn't a pleasant word." I'm like, "Damn straight you know what's worse? The actual."

Carrie: Being raped! Is there anything that you would like to tell listeners? Final thought.

Suzanne: Maybe here's the final thought, which is actually a request. People say to me again and again, people bring me use cases for the book. 

For those of you who are thinking about writing a book for a popular press, a publisher will tell you, you have to think of your top three audience personas. Who is this book for? I narrowed it down and that's who I wrote the book for. 

But secretly, I included a lot of other people. Then people keep on bringing new use cases to me. They're like, oh, I bought this book for my son's middle school administration because they're having this problem. Oh, I'm buying this for blah, blah, blah. A lot of people want to buy this book as a gift for people but the problem is that it has indexicality of similar to deodorant. It's sort of like, you stink, your hygiene isn't good, your verbal hygiene isn't good so let's fix it up. Honestly, you can find me at Suzannewerthime.com. You can hear how thoughtful I'm being about the framing to say to people, it's okay, this book is fine. The water's fine. Come on in. You're just going to learn how to be a better person. You want to be a better person. I'm not saying you're a bad person. 

You're a fine person with good intentions. How do I get that so I can help people buy this book for people who need it? It's one thing if the head of talent acquisition buys this book for their recruiters, and says, be better. We have to stop losing candidates. It's one thing if somebody buys this book for their executive team, head of DEI, and says, hey, I really don't want you to canceled or the wrath of the internet coming down on you. Let's read this book and we'll talk, like let's have a discussion group to get your stuff up to speed or even getting called out on blind or Glassdoor by Gen Z employees. But for people in other circumstances, I would love help. 

Megan: We've never had that before, but I'm thinking [crosstalk] 

Carrie: I like it.

Megan: Yeah, I like it.

Suzanne: I mean, because it is like deodorant, the person who needs the deodorant, it's in the end better for them. Their relationships with people are going to be better, but you have to be so careful with it. 

Megan: Absolutely. You don't want to push them away. That's a big thing. 

Suzanne: No, and you want them to feel like, I know you're a great person and don't you want to be presenting yourself to the world in this way. Here's a toolkit things have shifted and here's this really easy to read book that can with lots of great examples and activities you can practice on your own privately so you don't get embarrassed so you're already ramped up when you talk to people. Absolutely. 

Megan: It helps your relationships. 

Suzanne: Yes, all of them. Every relationship. 

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. We really appreciate you being here with us. This has been a lot of fun.  I've learned a lot from you. I always do when I chat with you. Thank you so much. We leave our listeners with one final message. Don't be an asshole. 

Carrie: Don't be an asshole. The Vocal Fries Podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon, theme music by Nick Granham. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at VocalFriesPod. You can email us at VocalFriesPod at gmail.com and our website is VocalFriesPod.com.

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