Dr. Valerie Fridland — The Good Side of Bad Language

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to Docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G Again, that's doxatant.com Bill G One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G Check it out today. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Bad language. This show is all about bad language. What's in it for that? Like, why would we want to do that? What's the deal there? Is it sus or is it lit? We'll be getting into all that in just a minute. Hopefully this show slays. My name is Bill Gallagher, Scaling coach and host of our Scaling Up Business podcast. Our show comes to you every week with some legit stuff in the world of Scaling up and the leadership required and language. Right? So much of the way that we relate to the world is language. And of course we deliver here with mostly words and there's power there. So scalingcoach.com I have a big ask of our listeners. If you're a regular listener, if you dig the show, then please go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your show and give us a review. We need a little more feedback to get our stats trending the way that we'd like to see them and representing all that we've accomplished over the last five years with the show. So if you would go there, give us an honest review wherever you watch, if you're on LinkedIn, give us a thumbs up. That kind of thing. If you are on YouTube could use it there. But Apple Podcast is the one we really need. So please do that for us as a favor. Right? If you are so inclined. All right, I'm joined now by Valerie Friedland. Valerie is a sociolinguist and she's got a book out and she's got a great blog on this subject. Her book is like literally dude Arguing for the Good in bad language. I saw the title, I'm like, oh. Right away. Cause I know there are many times that I've had clients say, yeah, we can't work with you. Cause you said fuck seven times before. Lunch. And I'm like, yeah, I did. I'm really deeply committed, and I'm not holding back. And I don't mean to be profane or offend and that kind of thing, but I was like, oh, I'm so in on this. And, of course, my dad was also a linguistics professor, so the power of language is something that's of real interest to me. So welcome to show Valerie.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here. I can't wait to hear some of your profane language.

I've already hit you with some. Just the opening of the show. Yeah. Well, I'll amp it up today. You know, it's funny. You're up in Reno and I'm down in San Francisco. I'm getting rained on, you're getting snowed on. This is the season that just doesn't quit. It is killing us here. We're ending our drought in a big way. I hope.

I hope so. I'm not sure I can take another year of this, but let's hope it does some good.

It's significant. It's significant. Well, I'll be up in your neck of the woods. I. I lead an accelerator program up there. I coach some companies in the Reno area. We do our boot camp up there with Vern at the. It's now called Everline Resort at Palisades, which all used to be squaw, but of course that's a bad word for some people. Deeply offensive. So they've changed all the names there. But that's a regular place that we do a lot of work in the world of scaling up, so. All right.

Yes. And I think they're actually open till July to ski, so you can get a little skiing in while you're there.

Fourth of July. Yes. Another good six days of skiing coming already scheduled this year. And we might get more up until 4th of July. Skiing is a really funny thing to do. It's usually pretty slushy by then, but it's a stunt. And you get like, a T shirt and you watch the fireworks at the.

End of the day. Exactly. Exactly. And you can ski while you're wearing your bathing suit. I mean, what could be wrong with that?

Well, you can do that today. You'll just be a little cold.

Yes. Probably not a wise choice.

Maybe not. So we've established where we are, the subject, that kind of thing. Why don't you tell us a little bit of your personal story about language, your interest in language. That. I think it's good. I liked reading that in preparation for the show. So talk about that.

Sure, sure. Well, you know, I'm a linguist, as you said. I teach at the university here, and I also write a lot about this subject. But, you know, when I was 10, I didn't say, oh, my gosh, forget astronaut, I want to be a linguist. That wasn't even part of my concern.

Noam Chomsky, wasn't your. On your.

On your bedroom wall, weird kids that read Chomsky's Syntactic Structures at three. But no, seriously, I. I really didn't have any concept of linguists even existing in the world. Not the type of linguist I am, where I look at theoretical kind of models of language. But what I did know is that my parents were not native speakers of English. I knew this mainly because whenever there was something really good and juicy they were talking about, they did that in French, which is a great motivator for a child to try to learn a language when they want to hear what their parents are saying and, you know, particularly what kind of punishment is coming down the pike. So, you know, that piqued my interest early in languages because I'd had parents that were native French speakers and, you know, English was a second language to them. I grew up in a southern city, which at the time, I'm not going to age myself, but it was not yesterday. And at the time, there weren't a lot of non native speakers of English there. So we were pretty exotic. And this was great in some ways. You know, I think my parents enjoyed feeling like they were kind of sophisticated in this Southern town because they got invited to cocktail parties and things like that, because, you know, they came with accents that were pretty valued, which our culture doesn't always do. But from my personal experience, I went to school and I would get teased at certain things I said that sounded like my parents. For example, I'd say things like human or huge without the h, because French doesn't have an h. And when I was seven, you know, my biggest models for language were my parents. So while I spoke English without an obvious accent, it's not like I spoke like my parents. I picked up features that I had analyzed in their speech and thought was true of what I should say. Well, you know, you say something about your huge teddy bear, and the kids aren't interested in your teddy bear, which was your point. They're interested in the fact that you sound weird and different and they tease you or say things. So this really alerted me, not just the fact that my parents were not native speakers, but also that they Were different in a way that people noticed and about. And that had some sort of social meaning with it. For me, the social meaning wasn't positive because it meant I stood out in school in a way that wasn't, you know, the right way to stand out. So this really kind of drove a lot of my thinking about language. And still couldn't have told you I would be a linguist until I went away to college at Georgetown and I signed up to be a language major. Part of the requirements of that major were that I take a linguistics class. Actually, I had to take six, I think I took a linguistics class. And we covered language and gender in that class. And it was like, oh, my God, my eyes were open. I understand so much more about why the world is structured the way it is from learning about simple things like how the patterns of our speech have a huge impact on our behavior towards each other, on how persuasive we are, how the perception of us comes across. So many different things that I had no way to articulate early on, but that I noticed. And that would be either from, you know, my relationships with other people, with friends or boyfriends, or my relationships with my parents. The way I saw people react to them, it just was really compelling stuff. And the fact that there was a whole science built around studying why language is so impactful and how it's so impactful, it just made me decide this was the topic I wanted to study. And that's how I got to be where I am today.

That is. That's a whole lot. I have one a side question for you. Did it ever become cool? Was there ever a point in your life where your parents and your background made you cool? Because sometimes in the right environment, like being French or being foreign, can. Can actually be kind of interesting for people, you know?

You know, as I got older. Yes, As I got older, when I was a little kid, you know, little kids don't care about those kinds of associations, which is one of the reasons why language in your formative years is so powerful. And that's why so many different things happen in our adolescent period. But it really was in my early adulthood where I think the sophistication associated with the French accent sort of became more prevalent in my imagination of why it's a good thing. My parents had these accents, and I think, you know, it was valuable to them. Actually. They found it sort of unique, and it put them in a position that was. Made them memorable. People wanted to know them. But what it didn't do is make them insiders so even though they might have been invited to a party, they were never really part of the southern community because their accents kept them out. And I think that tension between these ideas we have about the way speakers sound and what that means in terms of inherent qualities which are really based simply on prejudice and stereotypes that we have and this sort of solidarity and community connection that we get when we talk like somebody, you know, we call it homophily, which is a fancy words for saying that we're more associated and tied to people that we, we share values, beliefs and even speech with. I think, you know, there still that tension for them. So yes, it became cooler. But I think I still always recognize that they were outsiders because of it. And that was something that also piqued my interest.

It's interesting. So I grew up speaking four languages and my dad was conversational and over 15, which is really an exceptional level. And we could just land somewhere and he'd start talking to people and that kind of thing. And I, I can not speak any of them very well, not even English these days. But, but like, well, I can still think and I can watch TV in Hebrew, I can understand quite a bit of Spanish. But, but there's a, there's a challenge in keeping them active. But I did develop a skill that I have to this day and that is what some people call code shifting or like I will adopt language, mannerism, speech tone of an environment as I start to get in with a group or work with another thing and shift. And sometimes it can sound a little bit like a caricature without really even being conscious of it. I can try to fit in a little bit more. And then I notice that I also do this often somewhat unconsciously. I'll zing them with something that they're not expecting. I'll use a slang term or a profane word to get their attention to be like, oh, you're not supposed to say that. And then in addition, looking like I do like a middle aged white, you know, very mainstream, basic looking guy that can hit him with something that's a little too edgy that they're expecting from me in that environment. And I like use it sometimes unconsciously, sometimes very consciously to get attention, to draw the change the focus in a conversation.

This is very true to what really drives language change forward in many ways. We call it linguistic extravagance. People use language to stand out. They use language to make connections, to also fit in. But a lot of times once they're in a group that they fit in with and especially in adolescence, this is incredibly popular and often happens and brings in new forms and features. We also use language to draw attention to our points. So think about the last time you said something about a good book. If you just say, oh yeah, it was a good book, who's going to read that? If you're like, oh my God, it was such an amazing, totally terrific, phenomenal, crazy ass book, then that draws attention to it because you're using novel speech. And so that's actually really something that we find integral to the way that language change moves forward is that it sort of sets up this linguistic notice that then makes other people pay attention to you and that speech form. And sometimes whatever quality they associate with you as a speaker might also be associated with that form. And that's what makes those forms attractive to people outside the originating group. And that's sort of how we see language change spread.

It seems that for a mix of whole accidental things, that English is such a dominant language of business and culture around the world and like an accident of how cultures evolved and moved and who controlled what at what point. But it also seems to be something to me to do with the fact that English has been maybe more open than some to just adopting words from other sources as they see fit. Like that just, well, that works. Take that one on maybe not, you know, English aristocracy adopting fluidly, but like in particular modern American culture that just like, okay, whatever, like, and, and then all the popular culture of California and that kind of thing, that influence on media.

Well, historically, historically even British aristocracy invited new words into the language. I mean, if you look back in the history of English, English essentially is a colloquial language. It started as a vernacular language. It wasn't a classic language, it wasn't a learned language. People didn't do things institutionally in English for centuries. And in fact, our interest in elevating English to be a dominant, learned Langu language is only a few centuries old. So I think what people forget is that we come from very humble beginnings. And we criticized, we criticize people who we see as talking as if they are from humble beginnings or, you know, lower class backgrounds. But in fact, that is what language's power, what English's power comes from. It was for most of its life a vernacular language which allowed that flexibility and freedom you're talking about to let things in. So if you look back to Germanic English, so English in the Old English period prior to the year 2000, essentially, or 1100, it switched periods at the Norman invasion at 1066 so prior to that period, from about the 6th century to the 11th century, what we find is 100% Germanic word stock in English, everything. And we had case endings and inflections very much basically a German, a proto Germanic dialect, you know, of German today. What happened though, is we got introduced to French in 1066, and where did we get vast quantities of not just words, but sounds and new endings, all from French. So even during that period, though, English was not at all the language of the aristocracy. It was completely the language of the people. It was called a vulgar language. It was spoken on the streets, but not in institutions, not in education, not. Well, there wasn't really formal education like we have today, but not anywhere you'd go for education, not in religious ceremonies, not in legal documents. None of those used English. So English could thrive in its natural state. And what happens when we start adopting language in the learned context and we start using it in codified settings and standardize it and put a lot of pressure on speakers not to change? We actually cause language to stagnate and it doesn't evolve naturally. And by naturally I don't mean it becomes simpler or less complex or stupider, weaker or any of those things, because if that's true, then English is really in trouble. Because if you compare us to Old English, it's pretty awful. What I mean by that is that we follow the natural evolutionary tendencies of our brains and our mouths to make language look a certain way. And if we are not worried about what someone's going to think of us because we're moving in the direction that our brains and our mouths want to go, then it's going to happen naturally. And that's exactly what happened for that about 400 year period of the Middle English period. And it's only after that, in about 1600, in Shakespeare's day, when we all of a sudden embraced English as potentially the language of things like religion and legal institutions and the court and really started to put everything in English. And then for that reason, we had to start borrowing mass quantities of language, of words back in, because English had never been that. And, you know, you can't just invent legal vocabulary overnight, you can't invent medical vocabulary overnight. You have to get that from somewhere. So you make it up using the principles of language, you bring in completely new words, you combine previous words to make things which Shakespeare was famous for, and even more, you borrow it from other languages. So our history has made us a language of the people, which is why we invite so many different words and fashions into the language still today, because we still have that as the basic driver of what has made English so rich and beautiful in the modern era.

So I have a funny question. We're talking about really long term things and how English was a different language and serious people might have used Latin and Greek to study serious texts from books. But as a kid born in the early 60s, I think of in particular California language and terminology. And now today, with technology affecting the world. But first, first movie and TVs spreading out a California language. And then I think about today technology and technology terms, all of these things affecting the world a lot from where I happen to live and come from. Is it as big as it seems from my limited frame of my lifetime.

The impact of California.

The impact of California on the world language?

Yes, I think California has been a very influential American sort of area dialectically, but it's very much tied to this particular time and place. If you look back at the turn of the century, New England and the east coast was actually much more influential. And if you look at a lot of speech forms, like the difference between aunt and aunt, for example, and dropping Rs, which is prevalent still in Boston and New York, those were actually transatlantic dialect features, which was until about the 1930s, the dialect to know that was considered very posh and sort of what all newscasters used and what we aimed for and sort of what was valued by people. But then we turned towards more general American Midwestern kind of speech norms. And the Midwest became sort of the site of all things, sort of Americana and that kind of speech was valued. And then as we shifted our gaze west and LA and Hollywood became a big deal and movies were a huge industry and it could spread out the influence of California. Then what we find is the influence of California in the sort of American imagination and even international imagination became much more powerful and language forms associated with that area became very prevalent. And still today, California is definitely the site of a lot of new things that have come out. I mean, if you've ever seen Saturday Night Live, they have a skit called the Californians which is all about language. And they're like, dude, what's up? Where they have this very sort of funny California style. And actually linguists have done some analysis on some of their vowels to see if they're actually following any of the patterns of what we call the California vowel shift, which is a modern west coast phenomenon. And they, they, I mean, it's caricature, but they do follow it. For example, the back, the fronting of the back vowel oo, so cool becomes keely, which are actually overdone caricatures of something that's actually happening in California speech. So yes is the answer. It's not always that way. But as of late, that has been the most influential region speech wise in I think the American state of mind.

I cringe a little bit when that gets overdone like that, that cuel. I'm like, oh, I want to punch somebody. And I'm born in la, right. Born in la, surfed, lived in Hawaii, you know.

Yeah. So let me do a little LA speech test on you then, shall we? Do you want to do it?

Should we take the 405 that.

I'm sorry, no, not, not the 405 or just 405 and not whether you say hello or hecka, which born in la, I'm sure you don't because that's a Northern California feature. But let me give you a vowel test. So I'm going to spell words and I want you to say those words. I can't say them because me saying them actually might influence you. All right, so this is going to be sort of a test to see if you're a true Californian. Say the word C O, T. Caught. All right. Say the word C, A, U, G, H, T. Caught. And say those two together.

Caught. Caught.

All right. Okay. So now you see, there's no difference which is a very typical Southern California or just more Californian trait. Because if you were from the north, from east coast, you would say caught and koi.

Yeah.

Where you can hear. I mean, I'm overdoing it because I'm actually not a native New Yorker and I'm not very good at articulating that accent difference. But there's a very strong difference. Historically those are two different vowel classes. But it is part of the California vowel changes that they have merged together. So Steve passed the test. You're a true Californian.

Yeah. So look here I think is the thing for our, our listeners are business leaders. They're focused on growing companies. And I think one of the things that gets in the way is all the self consciousness about language and then an inhibition in using language powerfully. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on. But I can remember really specifically having a breakthrough in my career, going and taking a big corporate job. Now I'm going to start a division for a Fortune 500 company and I go give my first presentation and I said something in there like wildly or I used a term. I'm not that, and I got chastised for it. And then I was like, we don't talk like that around here. You're not like, out somewhere, you're, like, at a serious office managing many millions of dollars now, like, tone up, you know? And as a result of that, though, I suppressed all the passion, the aliveness and some of that thing for a long time. And I became like. And I still did a lot of public speaking, that kind of thing, but I became kind of known as much more gray, much more basic, if you will.

Well, you know, and I think that's a great point. And that is really one of the things that I try to really, really spend a lot of time talking about in the book is this idea that we have about language being a certain way that's actually really based on social perceptions and social benefits that actually is completely the opposite of the linguistic benefits that certain forms and features offer us. And when we try to stifle these natural tendencies, when we try to stifle youthful exuberance in language, because it is the young that innovates far more than the old that innovate. In fact, you know, hip grandpas might exist, but they don't exist linguistically.

I'm here to prove that wrong.

I'm a new grandpa, right? But I'm guessing that you don't create new forms in language. Very often. You pick them up after they're already there. Whereas it's young people, it's adolescents that are truly creative in language. There are a number of reasons why that happens, but it has to do with both the social networks they're in and also the brain connectivity and the neuroplasticity they have at that age. So they are particularly gifted linguistically. And so this is the time when innovations happen, which is why younger people are the ones that we tend to call out for using those kinds of forms and features. But when we take that attitude and we dismiss the speaker for the speech feature, we are making a huge mistake. For one, we're taking our own linguistic biases, which are usually founded on unsound principles. They're found, they're historically inaccurate, and they're sort of colored by our cultural moments versus the reality of linguistic principles. What we do is we sort of get away from hearing the actual ideas, the concepts, the novelty, the innovation that those speakers bring alongside with those speech features. So for everything that makes young speakers, or even younger and not young speakers, innovative, sort of stand out, interesting, have intensity. Those are the things we try to quash because they're not Normal or they're not sort of what we expect in this corporate culture. But what if we leaned in instead of leaned out and we looked past those things that we as just a speaker of a certain time and place and attitude deem as incorrect? And we actually saw actually historically and linguistically these are correct features. And they spent a lot of time in the book sort of detailing things like life. Where did it come from? Well, centuries old. Centuries old. And it simply has gotten associated in a negative way. There's nothing negative about it. It's extremely purposeful, it's extremely patterned. It has three really important purposes. And when we dismiss a speaker and don't listen to them because they're using like in their speech, and right away we're like, don't use that. I won't listen to you, I won't hire you, and you certainly can't represent my team. What we're doing is we're losing out on an opportunity. We're losing out an opportunity to learn a little more about what that speech feature does. We're losing out on an opportun to embrace innovation and novelty that might connect with our client base as well as have the employees connect with each other better. And we're losing an opportunity to listen to a message from somebody about who they are, what ideas they have, what concepts they can creatively bring into our culture or our workplace because we're so tied up with the way they're talking and we're busy being a language policeman rather than a linguistic language listener. And so I think, you know, the general idea here is we're both wrong when we judge people for their speech. Because if you look at the history of those speech features, we're making a basis on a social level, not a linguistic one. Right. There's no principled way that those are bad features. They're simply socially dispreferred. And that's a very different thing. But we're also losing out because we're not. We're not looking at this as an opportunity to connect with the next generation of our employees and the next generation of our clients.

You know, as we scheduled to do this show, I was thinking about not suppressing yourself and having room and freedom and full self expression and not suppressing your language and also your emotion and passion and having a full, like a full palette, a full range of a full tool set to be as a leader. But as you're speaking about this, I'm also thinking then about how often I judge people and probably others do too, when they Exhibit a lot of slang when they have vocal fry, that creaky voice when they talk like a particularly young person. And then in the back of my mind I am like, what the hell do you know? Do you have any experience? Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Right. And I have that thing very frequently where I'm like, okay, I hear a lot of passion, intelligence, but really are you ready for anything? And it's a instinct. I mean, I work very hard to then set it aside and listen to what's there. But the first thing is to judge the person as being too young and not ready for prime time. And I think we do that around all kinds of things. In fact, I had a boss once years ago who's like when I need to negotiate something and he was from New Orleans, he's like, I let the full south show up in full effect because people hear southern accent, they think stupid in the north and the west and simple minded or whatever. And I know that's going to work to my favor so I just act as southern and dumb as I can and then I, you know, am letting them say too much and all that kind of thing. And he, he used it consistently for negotiating things.

Right. He uses it to his advantage.

To his advantage. Right.

I think, you know, I'm not saying that young people have the experience of older people, but judging that they don't have their experience based on their speech is sort of a ridiculous correlation to make. And you know, the other thing is when we look at how these speech features function, a lot of times they actually bring a lot of benefits to your speech. And we're not just talking about young people's speech, we're talking a lot about features that people just don't like. So I think a famous one is umming and uh, ing. Right?

Oh, you should stop doing that.

Right, yeah, right. But there's actually very little scientific research that suggests they're negative in any way. And in fact what they tend to do is they appear before harder cognitive processing tasks. So what that means is when we study them, what we find is when you use more difficult vocabulary, less familiar vocabulary, less, you know, less sort of well known vocabulary, such as something like saying transportation versus supply chain logistics when we're constructing very difficult sentences. So ones that have embeddings that aren't simple, that they have complex sentence structure, syntactic embeddings, and when we talk about things that are less familiar than more familiar, and when you're in a workplace, these are natural things you're using bigger. You're using bigger sentences. You're talking about less familiar things. So it should not be surprising that ums and us come in to signal this work, this cognitive work. And one of the reasons that we said, and I just gave you an example of an there. One of the reasons we think people use them is not just to signal I'm doing really heavy cognitive retrieval, but that this works as a signal to a listener, both that you're stopping for a moment while you finish this processing, so not to interrupt you. And we actually see that people use ums and uhs a lot less with computers, for example, than if talking to another partner, because they don't assume that computer is going to try to interrupt them when they pause for a moment. Yeah, right. But it also seems to help with information processing. So if I use an um or a before something, I'm telling you, we actually find that people seem to process it quicker. They also remember it better later. So here's a funny little thing that we think of as a bad feature, but actually we see it does some pretty good, good stuff. So, you know, again, here we have a situation where we have social ideas about something that might not be so linguistically sound if we actually study how they work. So it's not just young people's speech. It's also a lot of times we have certain ideas about. I hate when they talk. I hate when they give this presentation because they're umming and uh ing all the time. It's so annoying and distracting. But again, which think about what the value of ums and ahs are. Now, that doesn't mean someone that overdoes any of these is well received. You know, there's a difference. Like, I like ice cream, but I can't eat it every day. So there's nothing wrong with ice cream. It's fabulous. But if I did nothing but eat it, that would be a problem. But that's a very small minority of speakers that actually overuse these things. But in our belief system, it's a lot of speakers, but it's actually not held up.

And I think you get too much, too much anti training to try to rid that. I know that I do a fair amount of ums and ahs, and I also know that I am a very effective, accomplished, experienced speaker, whether it's TV or on stage. And I do fine. But I know that very often when I'm trying to formulate an idea or say something, I will interject a few ums and ahs and Yet I also have encountered people who just string them together. It just doesn't stop um, um. And I'm like, oh, stop, stop. Just get your thought together and then speak. There's some amount of it that, that seems good. We probably all have different tolerance for certain amounts of it.

That's right. And I think also we fall back on it differently. So the standard use happens to be, as I described before, these certain cognitive tasks. But sometimes people use them as discourse markers and they may overuse them in that context. So what we notice when we look at studies, some people are heavy Ummers, they're called, and other people are sort of moderate Ummers, and other people are hardly ever Ummers. And that doesn't seem to correlate necessarily with how good of speakers they are. So for a great comparison, Obama was actually. Is a heavy Ummer. He actually prefers over, which is typical of men. Men use a much higher rate of uh than women and women use a higher rate of um. So that's a little fun. Fascinating linguistic tidbit. There are lots of reasons for that, but for another day. But Trump is a very low umrna. So you know, you have. And Obama is. Is prized for his eloquence and generally Trump has not been been lauded for his evidence, so for his talking. So I think there's a good comparison that the correlation of ums and US doesn't necessitate. You're a good or a bad speaker. So we need to kind of move away from that model and let it be more natural. But again, if you do something to excess, of course that's a different story. But that's really not the typical speaker we're talking about.

No particularly great speaker. Sometimes a little verbose, sometimes a little long winded. But you know, Bill Clinton was also a pretty great speaker, but also Ronald Reagan, a great speaker on different sides of the political spectrum. The younger Bush, not such a good speaker on the whole.

But that's right.

As we delve into politics, I think there's something. There's power in language, right? As a leader, one of the key things that you have is the things that you say, the way you articulate the vision and the values and what the company is up to. The way that you express things in reality, you use language for that. And there's power in knowing how others are speaking and not discounting them so that you could fully hear them and then being able to speak in a way that's appropriate to them. And then also use language intentionally to change things up and not to be so preoccupied with yourself that you get overly obsessed with your ums and ahs and try to keep things out. And then you're not, you're in your head and you're not out there and you're not on message and being worried about like letting something come out so you don't say what you would naturally say, which might be, fuck that at some, at some moment, right at a meeting.

And people would pay attention because that was sort of anomalous to what your usual personality was like. Yeah. I think the interesting thing is if we look at research on the voice of leadership, what we find is there are some linguistic markers that correlate with, with those that are in leadership positions. Again, would using these make you a leader? Not necessarily, but they come out naturally from people in those positions. One, for example, is the use of certain pronouns. What we find is that leaders of companies, leaders of governments, tend to use more we pronouns, more or other base pronouns. Right. They also say they or he or she rather than using I as a pronoun. It's actually less frequent in those voice in the talk of leaders because they're building teams, names. Their goal is to talk about us as a sort of unified community, this as a unified company. And we don't do things or I don't do things, we do things. They also know to give credit to others by saying she did this or they did this. And so when we actually study the use of pronouns of leaders compared to employees, we find that they use more other based pronouns than employees do. The other interesting correlation is voice pitch. We find that higher voice pitch tends to correlate with lower position in corporate culture than a higher voice pitch. There was actually a really interesting study that was done where they assign tasks to groups in a workplace based kind of setting. And they had studied their voice pitch prior to the test. So everybody had a baseline voice pitch. We all have an average voice pitch, which is what we typically use in our speech. Voice pitch is simply the vibration of the vocal fold. And so it's as air moves through them to make speech. So as they were doing the task, they were restudied for their vocal pitch. They recorded them basically. And we can instrumentally study voice pitch by measuring it on computer with acoustic analysis, sort of of waveforms. And what they found was those that adopted leadership positions during the task had lowered their voice pitch as the task went on. And those that adopted following positions, so sort of were team members, not leaders, adopted higher pitch as the task went on. So we find the Same correlations with voice pitch and expert versus non expert status. Both men and women are found to increase or, I'm sorry, lower their voice pitch as they take on the role of expert or explanation of something that they have as their knowledge base in workplace settings. So this tells us we have pretty strong correlations.

They lower their pitch as they have authority.

Right. So as you're asking them a question, that's just sort of what they did last weekend, for example. You know, so if you are talking to Sally and you're like, hey, tell me about your part, that party you went to. You know, you have a conversation. But then if you say, okay, Sally, I know this is your area of expertise, can you tell me how to do this? I'm not quite clear on this report how to approach this. Or tell me about the way that this transportation model set up, or whatever you're asking, that's in their area of expertise. They tend to adopt a lower voice pitch relative to their average pitch when they say those things. So what this tells us is we associate lower voice pitch pretty strongly with authority and leadership, which doesn't mean that there's anything stronger or smarter about lower pitch. But what it suggests is that we've associated models of low voice pitch speakers, usually men in those contexts and even evolutionarily large animals have lower, deeper voices, lower, deeper growls and things like that. And that has translated to this model of social dominance that we have today. So you had said something about vocal fry earlier. You know, that's kind of annoying. And what's interesting is, guess who is associated with vocal fry? Women. It is really strongly associated with women in this. In this country. Now, that's different in other countries. Actually. In Britain, men use vocal fry and are associated with vocal fry at a higher rate. Rate, which means there's nothing wrong with vocal fry. But we do see a lot of claims about it being a nasty feature, a bad feature. Women need to move away from. It makes them seem unemployable, you know, all these different things. But what does vocal fry do? It gives you a lower voice pitch. Because vocal fry is an excursion. It's caused by an excursion into low pitch. And where do we find it? Often in workplaces. The earliest studies of vocal fry that we find in the United States are associating vocal fry with women in broadcasting. Where was a place that women were strongly ridiculed for high shrill voices broadcasting. So why are women bringing vocal fry in? Because it's urban, professional and has authority behind it, which is exactly how young women take and read vocal fry. So this is one of those cases where we judge this feature that we don't like because it's different and because women are now increasingly in workplaces so we hear it more. It's more noticeable in their voices because it's a drop from a higher pitch to a lower pitch, which is not as salient if a man does the same thing. And who are we ridiculing for it? Women. Because we don't understand the feature and we don't understand its purpose. But if you actually step back and look at the research and understand why it's happening, then you can say, okay, actually, this makes a lot of sense. And they're just trying to do it for professional advancement and respect.

Well, I notice that if I want to get attention, I may raise my voice or interject or burst out a little bit. The volume may go up a little bit. But then if I want people to listen and lean in, I'll drop down and I'll get lower.

Right.

And I know if I lean in a little bit, I'll get them to lean in, and I can drop down and I can speak slower and more deliberately, and I can let the voice get much more gravelly. Right. And that's definitely not always conscious, but definitely intentional shift of something that we want to cause a thing in listening. And it's interesting. I hadn't really thought of the vocal fry like that. I just think of it as sort of a cultural, social thing that we maybe noticed more was in place before the Valley Girl movie and, like, that kind of thing. But some of the terminology and the way of speaking totally got off to a start there.

There. Well, it actually didn't start there, but it got propelled. It got propagated. Right. We rarely see Hollywood picking up features that are new. They don't invent features. They pick up. Pick up sort of these undercurrents. But then they do. What they do is they broadcast and propagate. And that's when the rest of the world was like, oh, my God, gag me with the spoon. You remember that one.

I think men, when you think of, like, a surfer type, you will hear some of that. That. Some of that same thing. I think they'll. They'll try to act cool. Spicoli was like that, you know, like.

Right, Absolutely.

Yeah. And it's. It's kind of cool in that regard. Like, I don't really care what's happening. I'm so above it all. Oh, so much, I think about here.

Very cool feature. I mean, who doesn't want to be cool. Right. And that's very much tied to adolescence. Again, none of us want to be, you know, I, I don't want to be a corporate raider when I'm 12. What I want to do is be cool. So I'm not going to adopt the features of a 50 year old because that's certainly not cool. I'm going to go out into the community, I'm going to look at what's on Hollywood. I'm going to go see what Southern Californians do because of course they're cool, the surfer dudes. And that's what I'm going to pick up in my speech. So that's how we sort of, we put these qualities of coolness on these features, especially in adolescence.

Isn't it funny that tension there? So in early teens you want to fit in, but you want to be cool, which means you want to be a little different and noticeable. So I want to fit in and. Yeah, but I want to be unique.

I know. And it's so funny because it's not agentive. It's not like we're thinking those things, but that's exactly how we do it. I remember, you know, who doesn't remember their high school years and sort of paying attention really sharply to the girls that were really cool in school and you know, you kind of bring their dress on and you take their, you adopt their speech features and you, you know, you kind of go where they go. It's just the way of adolescence. But it's so funny when you get older. We still do the same things. You know, you notice what your neighbors are driving and what they're doing and whatever icons that you have in the fashion world or sports world and you adopt those features. I've heard a lot of men of a certain age, you know, certainly not adolescents that call each other bro and dude. You know, the same sort of signals of cool solidarity. Yeah, exactly. It's the same thing. You know, we have this needle need for connection and I think language helps us achieve that.

Well, we're about time. Let me shout out your show. Shout out a couple other things. Remind folks that I could use review. We could use some reviews over on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get this YouTube or like that kind of thing and like, and subscribe helps you. But if you give us a review that would give us a little lift and help us hit our numbers for the quarter, which is good for us. And if we can help you with anything, if you want to get in touch with us. Our website is scalingcoach.com where we've got hundreds of episodes of the show on everything to do for the last number of years. Now we bring a couple to you every week and if you want to drop us a note if we could help you find a scaling coach in your area, infocalingcoach.com is a good email for us or if you want to tell us about a guest you think that we should have on the show. We book months out but we would love to hear your ideas and thoughts that. So infoscalingcoach.com, scalingcoach.com couple thank yous. Thank you to my friend and mentor Vern Harnish, author and creator of Scaling up and the Rockefeller Habits that came before it, to our producer, my assistant Wanda Mitchell in the background getting our show ready and out the door every week and then to the folks at podflight Productions who edit our audio and shownotes and and do the distribution like that. So thanks to all of those folks. And then if you want to get the book or check out more info about Valerie and what makes her cool. Valeriefriedland.com Valerie Friedland F R I D L A N D It'll be in the shownotes also.com and you can find her book also like literally dude arguing for the good in bad language. So excited to have you on the show. It was really great. Thanks for joining us.

Sure. It was fun to be here.

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