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Move Beyond the Dictionary

AFTER THE CLIENTS had waved their final goodbyes and walked out the door, Monica’s boss Rebecca pulled her aside. She said in a concerned tone, “Monica, could you please straighten your hair the next time you’re presenting to clients? Right now, it looks really unprofessional. To be honest, it felt like you were being disrespectful coming in with that frizzy mess.”

Monica took a deep breath. She had carefully timed her wash day and spent hours getting her curls defined and in good order for the big presentation. She was wearing her best suit, an expensive silk blouse, and new shoes. Monica felt like she looked polished and professional, just like the slide deck she had worked so hard to craft for her presentation.

“Thanks for letting me know,” she responded. But her shoulders slumped as she walked back to her desk, dejected, after what had felt like a real triumph just a few minutes earlier.

Monica had been hearing workplace comments about her hair since her first job at fifteen, working the registers at the fast-food place a few blocks from home. She had been told that the only “good hair” was straight hair; that only European-looking hair was “professional hair.” That her natural hair was “unkempt” and “messy” and “a bird’s nest.” So she, and most of her other Black female friends, spent a ton of money on relaxers and silk presses and wigs. They damaged their scalps, they avoided swimming and rainstorms, they pressed themselves into the mold in which there’s only one way for women to look professional.

But this company had said a lot of appealing things about diversity, equity, and inclusion. “Bring your authentic self to work!” they had announced on the website and during onboarding. What’s more, in her last two quarterly reviews, Rebecca had told Monica that she was performing at the highest levels, well above expectations, and that she was clearly headed for higher-profile projects and other great things.

So Monica had thought that this was finally a workplace where, as part of her authentic self, she could bring her authentic hair. As she sat at her desk, she let out a sigh heavy with disappointment. It looked like that talk about authenticity was just that—only talk.

About an hour later, Monica overheard another manager, Juana, who was standing at Rebecca’s desk. (In our “employee experience” interview a few months later, Monica told me that in their open office, you could hear basically everything from anywhere.) Juana said, “You were kind of harsh with Monica before, don’t you think? She was so well prepared, and her presentation was great.”

Rebecca replied quietly, “But it’s for her own good. We need her to look professional. She needs to look professional for the sake of her own career. Or she’ll never get ahead. Maybe it was uncomfortable for her to hear, but I’m doing her a favor.”

Juana paused and said, “But, my friend, this is a really narrow view of what it means to be professional. Professional is a loaded word that can carry some serious bias. You’ve got to be careful how you use it.”

• • •

In my experience, people like Rebecca are surprised when they are told that professional is a word that is often used in problematic ways. I frequently hear them defend their word choice, and the most common way is by turning to what they see as the ultimate authority on words and their meanings—the dictionary.

Let’s say Rebecca hopped online to open a few dictionary websites and see how professional is defined. She’d find relevant definitions that tell her that professional people:

• act in line with the ethics and standards of their profession;

• are appropriate for their profession;

• are businesslike;

• are conscientious and courteous;

• are effective, skilled, organized, and serious in their manner; and

• work to a high standard.¹

So Rebecca could bring these entries to Juana and say, “See! The definitions of professional are all positive. There’s nothing wrong with the way I used that word.”

But here’s the thing—the dictionary doesn’t tell Rebecca about the hidden meanings associated with the word professional. And it doesn’t tell her that judging someone professional or unprofessional is often associated with racial bias and gatekeeping.

Dictionaries are great! But they don’t reveal everything you need to know about how a word is working out there in the world. And they often don’t give you the information you need to distinguish between problematic language and inclusive language.

In order to be inclusive in your language choices, there are times you’re going to have to move beyond the dictionary.

LANGUAGE IS LIKE A FUNGUS

I like to compare language to a fungus.

When you see a mushroom, it may feel like you’re seeing an entire fungus. But, in fact, you’re just seeing the above-ground fruit. Underground is the mycelium—the part of the fungus that has elaborate and sometimes enormous structures, structures that may have interconnected networks.

I’m a big fan of the work of Suzanne Simard, whose pioneering research taught the world how fungal networks allow trees to talk to one another and to share resources.² She was trying to solve a mystery: after old-growth forests had been cut down and new single-species trees had been planted in their place, the new trees were much frailer and more likely to die. And the reason why turned out to be mostly underground.

The new trees were missing both their old neighbors from other species and the complicated fungal networks that connected them all, that helped them access the water, phosphorus, and nitrogen they needed to thrive. Simard had discovered a previously unknown type of interspecies communication between fungal networks and individual trees.

When other scientists studied fungi, it was usually in the lab, taken out of context. They could only learn so much about a fungus when it was isolated; they might think they had the whole picture, but they were actually seeing only a tiny piece of it. In isolation, there was no way for them to understand the subtle and dynamic communication that goes on when a fungus is out in the wild, living its best life.

Language is like a fungus.

When you pull it out of context and study it in isolation, you’re only seeing some of the picture. In this analogy, a single word is like a mushroom. It may look like a complete entity, something that can be studied on its own.

But it’s actually just the visible part of a complex underground system, a system that’s invisible if you’re only looking at the surface. When you take a word out of context in order to examine it, you’re only going to find some information about it. You’ll be able to learn more about a single word’s meaning, what we call its semantics. But you’re going to miss those hidden, subtle, complicated networks that connect words—and connect people.

These are the complicated structures and networks that people like me spend time digging up and analyzing. And just like the fungi that scientists couldn’t fully analyze when they were isolated in a lab, there is a lot of complicated stuff going on with words that can only be figured out by examining them in context. Dynamically, in interaction.

Context is everything. And it is the key to understanding why a word like professional, which you’ll find defined really positively in any dictionary, can be deeply problematic.

In the rest of this chapter, I’m going to share with you three different ways linguists and linguistic anthropologists dig in and find the meaning hidden in complex communication structures: 1) semantic frames, 2) indexicality, and 3) “flavor.” These three concepts can help you move past the dictionary and understand why words with positive or neutral dictionary definitions may not actually be inclusive when used in a conversation or email or video or text message.

If you’ve taken linguistics or linguistic anthropology classes, you might already be familiar with these concepts; if not, chances are good they’ll be new to you. But they’re easy to remember, and they’ll give you the power to figure out what’s going on with all kinds of problematic language. I’ll be using these concepts throughout the rest of the book, when I go through my Six Principles of Inclusive Language. The more you understand how language really works when it’s out in the world, the better you’ll be able to apply the principles of inclusive language.

SEMANTIC FRAMES EXPRESS MEANING

A single word, most clearly when it’s a noun or a verb, has a hidden structure called a semantic frame. The semantic frame is one of the ways you relate words to the world around you. A word can generate an entire scenario in your head, with a setting, players, and action.

For example, think about the verb purchase. It’s just one word. What can you tell about the scenario for the verb purchase?

• There are at least two people involved. A buyer and a seller.

• There is the thing being purchased—the goods.

• This isn’t a gift or a barter scenario, so we know money is playing a role.

• And there is a location—which these days is as likely to be online as in a brick-and-mortar store.

So, the scenario invoked by the verb purchase can be summed up like this: in a given location, a buyer gives money to a seller in exchange for goods.

If you think about it, that’s really a lot of information about the world packed into just one word.

Sometimes we need to look at a word’s framing to uncover bias or other distortions, such as double standards. This is where the same behavior is presented as either acceptable or unacceptable, good or bad; the only difference is who is doing it.

For example, two news photos were widely circulated in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, which severely damaged several states in the American South. These photos showed people doing exactly the same thing—wading through chest-high water carrying groceries in a bag. In one photo, the caption describes the two people pictured as “finding bread and soda from a local grocery store.” In the other, the man pictured is described as “looting a grocery store.”³

Here we have two different words to describe exactly the same action. And the frame generated by the verb loot is very different than the one generated by the verb find.

In the scenario of looting, a person is engaged in criminal activity that’s usually presented as not based on real needs.

In the scenario of finding, a person is doing something neutral or even positive. They are seen as human beings, doing what you or I might do in the same circumstance—in this case, going into a store and finding food.

You may have already guessed that in these photo captions, the person framed as looting was Black, and the people framed as finding were white.

Semantic frames also let us see double standards in topics like discussions of children’s behavior and parenting. And just as with looting vs. finding, race and ethnicity can play a major role.⁴ A white child may be described as enthusiastic and a bit impulsive for the same behavior that gets a Native American child labeled disruptive and undisciplined. Black students in the US are suspended at three times the rate of their white peers, often for exactly the same behavior—it has just been framed differently.⁵ Researchers who study the school-to-prison pipeline find that students of color are often suspended for behavior that is difficult to define, including insubordination and willful defiance.⁶ The framing of insubordination and defiance presents a student who is deliberately resistant, rebellious, disobedient. Someone who will not listen to authority. Compare that scenario to the framing that comes with other ways to describe the same behavior, such as high-spirited, smart alecky, and bold.

Who is dressed like a hooligan and who is dressed casually? Whose hair is tousled and whose hair is unkempt? Who is giving their child autonomy and helping them become self-sufficient and who is neglectful and inattentive? Race and ethnicity are often the key to digging up the double standards found in semantic frames.

When I look for bias in semantic framing in the workplace, I usually discover that it’s more subtle than finding vs. looting. Here, I frequently find that gender is the main factor in the double standard.

For example, two people engaged in the same behavior may be described differently in performance reviews. I’ve seen men who speak with force and enthusiasm at work described as passionate. And I’ve also seen women who speak with force and enthusiasm described as abrasive. It’s the same behavior but framed with bias. In fact, a 2014 study of performance reviews showed that in a set of hundreds of written reviews, only women were described as abrasive.⁷

(To be more specific, this study was of people who were perceived as women and people who were perceived as men. In my research, I’ve found that the perception of gender seems to play a much bigger role in how behavior is judged than how people actually identify. So in this example, and in other examples in this book, unless I say otherwise, I am using “women” as a shorthand for “people perceived as women” and “men” as a shorthand for “people perceived as men.”)

In my work, I’ve also found that only women are called bossy—meanwhile, men who engage in the same behavior are called leaders. It is usually only women who are called aggressive, while their male counterparts are called assertive. And when men might be called conscientious or straightforward for pointing out problems, women who do the same are often called difficult or problematic.

With those kinds of framings and their hidden bias, who do you think is more likely to get promoted based on their performance?

Semantic frames even affect how we view people who are pointing out problems—including behavior that meets the legal definition of discrimination or harassment. In 2020, lawyer Leslie F. Levy invited me to be part of a presentation she was giving at an employment law conference. She was advising plaintiffs’ lawyers to stop using the word complaint and start using the word report instead. For example, instead of saying that a client “complained about the sexual harassment to her manager,” Levy was recommending that lawyers say their client “reported the sexual harassment.” And she asked me to use linguistics to explain why changing out this single word could make a difference.

FrameNet, a fantastic resource on semantic frames, tells us that complaining is framed as “communicating a negative emotional reaction to some state of affairs.”⁸ By contrast, the frame for reporting is when someone “informs the authorities of illegal or improper behavior by a wrongdoer.”

See how different the scenarios are? The complainer is seen as emotional and having a negative reaction to something that may or may not be a real problem. By contrast, the reporter is objectively passing along important information about illegal or unacceptable behavior.

If you’re an employment lawyer—or someone dealing with discrimination or harassment—the choice is clear. You’ll want to report the problem, since describing your actions as complaining makes it easier to dismiss them as just an emotional overreaction.

(Note that many people who are perceived as female face the challenge of being labeled “emotional” as a way of minimizing or dismissing the problems they are talking about.)

Dictionary definitions usually aren’t enough to point out a double standard that is being applied based on gender, race, or some other group membership. If you remember that semantic frames can encode bias, then you’ll be able to check the frame and the scenario it invokes to see if a word is inclusive or problematic.

HOW WE “POINT” TO SOCIAL MEANING

Have you ever wondered why the second finger of your hand, the one next to the thumb, is usually called the index finger?

That’s because when you index something, you point to it, and this second finger is the one most commonly used for pointing among English speakers. In many places, it’s considered rude to point with any of your fingers. For example, when I lived in Russia, I learned to point with my lips, which was pretty fun. Pointing with the index finger isn’t universal. But words that point to things in the world are.

This is also why the list of words and page numbers at the end of a book is called the index—because it points to the places in the book where you can find each concept.

Words point to things in the world.

For example, the word tree can point to the general concept of a tree (“A mature tree can increase your property value”), or it might point to a specific tree (“Hey, look at that beautiful tree over there!”).

Some words are completely dependent on their context. This means they have no fixed meaning that you can find outside of that context.

For example, if I say “yesterday,” the actual date being pointed to will change based on the day that I say it. When I said “yesterday” the day that I was typing these words, it pointed to the date August 16, 2022. But if you, reader, set aside this book and write or say (or sign the equivalent of) “yesterday,” it will point to an entirely different date.

And if I’m having a conversation with someone in English, the meaning of the words I and you will change depending on who is talking. If I’m the one talking, then I points to me. And if the other person is talking, then I points to them.

Figuring out what the words tree and I are pointing to is pretty straightforward. But it gets a lot more complicated when you try to figure out the intricate and dynamic ways that words point to social and cultural meaning. In my field of linguistic anthropology, we call this indexicality.

When words are on decorative objects, it can be a little easier to understand the social meaning they’re indexing.

For example, if I see someone wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Matt Berry and the words, “Jackie Daytona, Regular Human Bartender,” I can be pretty sure they’re a fan of the TV show What We Do in the Shadows. I once stayed at an Airbnb where the hosts had put the word Blessed carved out of wood on a shelf near the entrance. This suggested to me that they were religious, and probably Christian. And if I see someone wearing a baseball cap that says, “The Town,” I know that they feel a sense of pride in being a resident of our city of Oakland, California, which has long had the affectionate nickname “Oaktown.” The shirt, the carving, the hat—each of them signals a group that someone belongs to.

But when words are spoken or signed or written as part of face-to-face conversations or emails or text messages, the social meaning they index can be a lot more subtle.

Some words and ways of speaking seem to point to gender. For example, cursing is often seen as more masculine, while saying “sorry” or using very precise color terms like magenta is often perceived as more feminine.

Other ways of speaking may index a regional or racial identity. For example, saying “fixin’ to” can mark the speaker as from the American South. And leaving out the verb is or are in phrases like “she ready” can point to ways of speaking associated with some Black Americans—often in less-formal, in-group settings. (It can also point to Caribbean English spoken by people of many different racial and ethnic backgrounds.)

In ways that have become especially clear in recent years, there are words that point to political stances and membership. In the US, calling someone a “snowflake” suggests that you are a member of the American right wing and probable supporter of the 45th president. And talking about how it’s important to “acknowledge white privilege” marks you as someone on the left who is interested in the pursuit of social justice.

Indexicality may work differently for autistic people and allis-tic people. For example, for sighted people, the amount of eye contact in a conversation can point to different kinds of social meaning. In Western cultures, allistic speakers may interpret a lack of eye contact as a sign of disrespect or disengagement. But autistic speakers may find eye contact too distracting or overwhelming, so their lack of eye contact may signal that they are listening more intently, and so demonstrating more respect and attention.

Here we have a communication clash that has its roots in different origins. Allistic speakers have indexicality for eye contact that is rooted in culture—they have been socialized since infancy to attribute different kinds of social meaning to different kinds of eye contact (for example, honesty, respect, or sexual interest). But autistic people’s eye contact patterns come from biology, from their neurotype. For these speakers, the amount of eye contact affects how they process language, along with their neurological reactions to the interaction.

Similarly, knitting during interactions like meetings is an activity that allows many autistic people or people with ADHD to concentrate better and participate more fully. However, neuro-typical people may interpret the knitting as rude or a distraction and a sign of disrespect or lack of focus. In addition, the autistic tendency to interpret comments and speak more literally is often understood as deliberately rude by allistic people. For example, an autistic employee leaving a company was asked by his boss on his last day, “Are you going to miss working here?” “No,” he answered straightforwardly. His allistic colleagues laughed as if it was a joke, and his boss looked taken aback, but the employee had simply interpreted the question literally and answered it directly and honestly.

So how do indexicality and social meaning relate to inclusive language?

It’s because often when people are critiquing someone’s words—or the way these words are delivered when spoken, such as the accent or intonational pattern—they are giving a negative evaluation of the identity that is being indexed.

When someone says that it’s not okay for women to curse, the deeper issue that they’re pointing to is that, for them, women who curse are presenting themselves in ways that are “unfeminine” and therefore inappropriate.

And when someone says that a phrase like “she ready” is “broken English” and “ungrammatical,” they are actually saying that certain ways of speaking that are associated with Black Americans are inappropriate and unacceptable.

There is a very wide variety of people out there in the world. And, in general, in more official contexts, the ways of speaking that index the dominant groups—the people with power—are the ones considered “neutral” and “appropriate.”

In the US, this means that places like corporate offices, television news, and newspapers are often understood as locations where everyone should pattern their speech and writing on white, heterosexual, middle-class (or higher), neurotypical, and abled men who grew up speaking American English. This is the identity pointed to when people in the US use the term professional.

Indexicality lets us find hidden meanings that don’t show up in most dictionary definitions.

THE “FLAVOR” OF WORDS

Language isn’t neutral. And words acquire a “taste” based on the ways we encounter them.

A Russian scholar named Mikhail Bakhtin had some incredibly useful insights into language. He pointed out that “there are no ‘neutral’ words and forms . . . that can belong to ‘no one.’”

That is, there are no words that are just out there—objective, detached, universal. Even words in the dictionary are defined according to the ways they are used by particular people in a particular time and place.

Instead, Bakhtin proposed that “All words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre . . . a particular person . . . an age group.” He noted, “Each word tastes of the context . . . in which it has lived its socially charged life.”⁹

Thanks to Bakhtin, we now understand that words acquire a flavor every single time you encounter them. From infancy up to today. Who said it, how they said it, if they were angry or cold or loving or scientific or condescending or respectful. Like a snowball, throughout your life, each word acquires its own social flavor that’s way more than just a dictionary meaning.

It’s why linguists know there are no true synonyms. Even if two words mean basically the same thing, they won’t have shown up in the same contexts or in the same ways. So they won’t have the same flavor. This is why you might find yourself searching through the thesaurus for words that mean pretty much the same thing. Each word has a slightly different flavor, and you want to find the one that matches the effect you’re going for.

Some words, like the or table, have a neutral flavor for pretty much everybody. But other words can be more charged.

For example, the flavor of the word exotic depends a lot on how you encounter it. For many people, it’s got a pretty minimal flavor that’s a little bit positive. For them, it’s just a word used to describe people or things from distant and foreign places. It hasn’t been used to describe them.

But for many other people, myself included, exotic has a stronger and definitely unpleasant flavor. These people are usually not white, and most of the time are perceived as female. Being told you’re exotic can be really othering. It suggests that people see you as different, as not really belonging. It can come as an unpleasant shock that someone is so focused on you seeming different and foreign. Especially when you felt like you belonged.

And it can also be inappropriately sexualizing. I’ve collected lots of stories where being called exotic was tied in with other inappropriate comments on appearance or being hit on. (Just typing these words made me realize I’m still irritated about a professional lunch that took place almost twenty years ago where a guy who grew up maybe fifteen miles away from me kept on telling me how “exotic” I was. He was Irish American, blond and blue-eyed. And I . . . was not.)

What this means is that just because the flavor of a word is neutral or positive for you, you can’t assume that it is also neutral or positive for everybody else. If somebody tells you, “Hey, I don’t like that word,” now you know that it has an unpleasant flavor for them.

Here’s a story involving exotic that was told to me a few years ago as part of a “company culture” interview. Shirin, who shared her experience with me, was born and raised in Iran until she was fourteen and then moved to California with her parents. She worked at a tech company and was reasonably friendly with a teammate named Rob, a white man who had been born and raised in the US. They didn’t hang out outside of work, but they ate lunch together a lot and joked around a bunch.

• • •

Shirin followed Rob as he headed into the kitchen with his empty plate. “Hey, Rob,” she said, “can I ask you a favor?”

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Well, you called me ‘exotic’ again just now. I know you think it’s a compliment, but I really don’t like that word. So, I’m asking you again, can you please stop describing me as ‘exotic’?”

“I mean, I guess,” Rob replied. “But this seems kind of oversensitive on your part, don’t you think? I mean, I wouldn’t mind if someone said it to me.”

Shirin’s eyes narrowed, and she bit back the angry words in her head.

“Well, Rob, no one here is ever going to call you exotic, are they?” she thought. “But I have to hear all the time about how different I am. I have to deal all the time with people asking about and trying to guess my accent. And with endless people looking at my skin and trying to figure out ‘what kind of brown’ I am, and creepy guys telling me how sexy I am because I’m so . . . exotic. I’m over it.”

• • •

Rob had fallen into two traps that hold people back from being inclusive with their language:

1. Thinking that someone is being oversensitive rather than looking for the ways the word he had used might have meanings that weren’t obvious to him

2. Assuming that because a word is okay for him, it’s acceptable for everyone else as well

Rob doesn’t understand that exotic is a word that Shirin has encountered again and again in ways that make it deeply distasteful to her. That the taste it has acquired over time is one she associates with people pointing out how different she is from them, how she doesn’t belong. Or how sexy she is, including times when sexualizing her is especially inappropriate.

Because Rob’s experience with the word exotic has been so different, he doesn’t recognize that the word tastes genuinely bad to Shirin. So, his judgment is impaired. And he leaves thinking she’s too thin-skinned, and that he’ll keep on saying exotic if he wants to, because it’s a perfectly fine word that shouldn’t bother anybody.

The next time he calls Shirin exotic it may do real damage to their relationship. She may decide that he’s not someone who can be trusted. Who she can enjoy lunches with or joke around with. That he doesn’t care about her feelings and doesn’t mind if he says things that hurt her.

But now you know more than Rob does. So instead of trying to convince someone they’re being overly sensitive when they tell you they have a problem with a word or phrase, you can work with them to find an alternative word that has a good flavor for you both.

• • •

The flavor of words—and how they relate to context—is another place where autistic and allistic speakers may differ. For example, some autistic speakers may repeat words or phrases out of context because “it feels good.” This is called echolalia, and while it may have a pleasant or calming flavor for the autistic speaker, it may have an unsettling or disconcerting flavor for allistic listeners who don’t understand why these words and phrases are being repeated in a way that seems random or unrelated to what is going on in the moment.

In addition, autistic people may find a certain word funny for “no particular reason,” which may trigger laughter. This laughter may seem disrespectful to listeners or seem like the autistic person is disparaging the concept or identity that the word points to. However, the laughter might be focused on the word itself rather than what it is pointing to. For example, some autistic people report that they are triggered into laughter when they encounter unfamiliar or uncommon words.¹⁰

The interpretation of statements and questions in context can also have a different flavor for autistic speakers and allistic speakers. For example, Darryl was shocked to learn that her boyfriend’s friends thought she was “manipulative” and “a gold digger.” When she asked for specific examples of why, she learned that there was an interpretation issue when she said things like “Oh, I really like that handbag. Too bad I don’t have the money for it.”

For Darryl, who is autistic, this was a simple statement of fact with no additional flavor. She was just sharing information in a direct and straightforward way. But for Darryl’s boyfriend and his friends, her statement sounded like a hint, an indirect suggestion that he buy her the expensive bag. This is because the flavor of statements like these is generally different for allistic people, who usually communicate more indirectly, using more subtext. This kind of interpretive difference in flavor, simple statement vs. loaded hint, can cause real relationship issues.

WHO IS “PROFESSIONAL”?

Let’s return to the story from the beginning of this chapter, the one where Rebecca told her report Monica that her hair was “unprofessional.” How does this play out in terms of the three kinds of hidden meaning I’ve unpacked for you?

Semantic Frames

We can deduce that in Rebecca’s mental model for professional, people who are office workers have straight hair. In this scenario, straight hair is professional. But curly hair, no matter how much effort and grooming have gone into it, is not.

(On a curly hair subreddit that I read for hair tips, people complain all the time about coworkers and bosses pulling them aside and telling them that their hair is “unprofessional.” One white woman was also told, “and it makes you look . . . ‘ethnic,’” in a way that was clearly not a compliment. Comments like these make the link between whiteness and professionalism more explicit.)

Indexicality

For Rebecca, the word professional indexes, or points to, behavior associated with white people who are middle-class or higher. She might believe that professional is a neutral concept, one that is objective and universal and just out there in the world. She doesn’t recognize that it is excluding specific dimensions of human identity—that it is setting up a model in which some people’s natural hair is professional and other people’s natural hair is not.

Flavor

No words are neutral and objective and universal. And for Rebecca, the Bakhtinian “flavor” of professional tastes almost completely like white people, or like people who have assimilated to white cultural norms. The vast majority of the time she has encountered people described as professional has been in contexts that are associated with whiteness, and often maleness.

So Rebecca is passing along a very unpleasant hidden meaning to her report:

And Monica, who had hoped for better from this company and from this boss, is hearing this message. For Monica, this hidden meaning also sounds like:

This hidden meaning can automatically disqualify people from being seen as professional when they have browner skin, or curlier hair, or speak a nonstandard dialect, or speak with an accent that comes when English isn’t your first language.

This is the very opposite of inclusive. And it is so common that it holds back the careers of millions of people. Black hair in particular is so frequently a source of discrimination that some US states have started to pass legislation protecting people who wear “natural” hairstyles, such as afros, twists, and locs.

What are the hidden meanings of professional for you? What is its semantic framing for you? Its indexicality? Its flavor?

You might want to examine what comes to mind when you think about the word professional and see if it encodes the same kind of hidden bias that Rebecca’s words showed us. What is your mental image of a professional person? If you’re asked to list five people who you think of as being very professional, who are they? What does a professional person sound like in terms of dialect and accent? What are they wearing? Do they have tattoos? Brightly colored hair? Who are examples of “professional” people in your field?

• • •

I’ll be using the three concepts of semantic frames, indexicality, and flavor throughout the rest of the book to reveal what’s going on with problematic language. Now it’s time to jump in to the Six Principles of Inclusive Language, so you can learn more about how to shift to more inclusive options.