The Secret Life Of Pronouns: What Our Words Say... ✦ Full Version

One Tuesday afternoon, a panicked executive named Julian sat across from him. Julian’s company was hemorrhaging talent, and he couldn't understand why. He handed Aris a stack of internal memos and transcripts from recent board meetings.

The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say The office of Dr. Aris Thorne was a sanctuary of silence, save for the rhythmic clicking of a mechanical keyboard. Aris was a computational linguist, a man who didn't listen to what people said, but how they said it. To him, nouns and verbs were the flashy actors on a stage, but the pronouns—the "I," "me," "we," and "they"—were the invisible stagehands holding the entire production together.

Fix the culture, Julian pleaded. Tell me who is lying and who is leaving.

You use 'we' constantly, Aris noted, tapping a finger on a graph. But look at the context.