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On Instagram in late January, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a series of stories calling out the prejudice inside the cringy phrase “word salad.” It’s an accusation of muddled speech that’s lobbed at people (okay, women) whose communication style differs from the traditional speaking patterns we associate with leadership—a.k.a men, or, really, any of us who match that linguistic style in order to get taken seriously. Any of us, for example, who endeavor to speak low and slow and use abstract and visionary language, or who aim for direct speech rather than roundabout. Ocasio-Cortez suggested that sometimes, despite our best efforts, when we think out loud, we’re told our words are impossible to follow—because really, what the listener means is they have no intention of trying to follow someone who doesn’t sound like them.
The truth is, each of us inadvertently shares whole dossiers of information about our lives when we speak, revealing where we’ve been and where we’re going through our accent, style of speech, and word choice (lofty or colloquial, sweary or clean, peppered with “like”s and “just”s, or more to-the-point). And those linguistic quirks shift as we bend our speech to fit the occasion. After all, you likely speak differently to your mom than you do to a lawyer or a little kid or your partner. You might alternate between dialects or whole languages to fit in, or get what you want, or pull rank, or keep yourself safe.
Read more: Talking Less Will Get You More
Most of us make these sorts of negotiations at rapid speed and often without conscious thought every single day, as we wrestle with how we’re perceived and how we want to be. In other words, the lengths we’ll go to avoid hearing “word salad.”
For 15 years, I’ve told movie stars what to do with their tongues. As a Hollywood…
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