There’s a moment in every feedback conversation where power shifts. Someone’s voice gets softer. Someone else’s gets firmer. Someone hedges; someone doesn’t. And in that moment, language does the work that hierarchies used to do explicitly.We think of workplace feedback as neutral—objective assessments of work done. But language doesn’t work that way. Language carries assumptions about who can do what, who should aspire to what, and whose job it is to apologise for the space they take up.This asymmetry has a name in linguistics, and it’s been here for decades. But research into performance feedback reveals something unsettling: the grammar that creates this asymmetry isn’t incidental. It’s structural. It compounds. And by the time a woman hears it in feedback, she’s already internalised the message embedded in its syntax. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribe

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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