The Strategic Linguist Podcast

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I’ve written about linguistic capital. About discourse asymmetry. About how the same interruption costs one person a nod and another person silence. How an explanation offered to you about something you already know signals what the speaker has decided about your category. How a woman’s hedged proposal lands provisional while a man’s confident assertion lands authoritative.
I’ve been describing frame theory all along. But I haven’t named it. This post gets into the details of the theoretical framework that makes all of this coherent.
Everything I’ve written—every article about asymmetry, every mental model about how power operates through language—rests on one foundational principle: context doesn’t clarify meaning. Context creates it. That principle has a name in linguistics. It’s called frame theory.
Once you understand frames explicitly, you’ll see why the same linguistic move feels natural in one moment and offensive in the next. Why direct communication is leadership in one situation and rudeness in another. Why the same sentence means something completely different depending on who says it and where.
And you’ll understand why every “universal rule” about communication you’ve been told is actually frame-specific advice. Why linguistics can’t be prescriptive. Why discourse analysis requires context. Why your entire professional life has been navigating frames without necessarily knowing that’s what they are.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com

You’re in a meeting. You propose something directly: “We should trial this in Q2.” Your manager nods, writes it down, credits you in the follow-up email. Same meeting, same table. Your colleague proposes an identical idea: “I wonder if we could maybe try this... if that seems reasonable?” The manager asks clarifying questions. Doesn’t write it down immediately. Later, when the idea comes up, it gets attributed to you. Or gets explained back differently. Or gets framed as tentative until someone else restates it with more certainty.
Same words. Different cost. Different outcome. Different message about who belongs in the room.
For years, the feedback both of you probably heard was about communication style. Be more direct. Don’t hedge so much. Project more confidence. Speak up. The problem, the logic goes, is how you’re communicating. The solution is to communicate differently. Change yourself. No clear direction, just do.
But there’s another way to look at this.

Before we begin. I know race is a sensitive subject so I will be clear. I speak from my own perspective. I do not speak on behalf of everyone who is mixed race. We all have our own ways of thinking about and expressing our identities. This is simply mine.



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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com

I almost always pull from my existing posts so these rarely sit as discrete thoughts. My body of work remains free for all subscribers — find more of my work on corporate narratives under the Professional Communication section in The Library.
This is the first in a three-part series on how founding narratives shape power.
Each piece examines the same linguistic mechanism operating at a different scale. This one shows why origin stories constrain everything that comes after. The next explores how organisations narrate pivots to look strategic. And the final piece reveals what recognising this pattern gives you in any context where narrative matters.
Every founding story follows a pattern. There’s a moment of vision. A problem nobody else saw. An ordinary person who becomes extraordinary through struggle and insight. These narratives work because they’re structured in ways that feel inevitable, almost mythic. Joseph Campbell called this the monomyth — the hero’s journey that appears across cultures and contexts. The structure makes the story feel true before you’ve checked whether it actually is.
But founding stories aren’t true or false in the way facts are. They’re narratives that do work. They establish legitimacy. They determine what an organisation believes about itself and what futures it can imagine. Once you’ve built your credibility on a particular founding narrative, changing that story becomes extraordinarily difficult.

The video edition of Linguistics Unscripted where I discuss the key themes of my body of work on Substack


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