Valerie Fridland: Like, Literally, Dude

Now, before we dive into the conversation, I have a special announcement to make. The Make It Happen Monday podcast is now part of the HubSpot podcast network. I couldn't be more excited to be on this network with such an incredible group of podcasters who I can't wait to collaborate with. And to get things started, my good friends Scott Lees and Richard Harris' Surf and Sales podcast is one of my absolute favorites. You have to check them out. Scott and Richard are about as authentic as it gets, and so are their conversations. They talk about all sorts of topics related to sales and give super actionable insights that you can usually apply immediately to your day-to-day role. One of the most recent episodes they talked about was negotiating severance as part of your hiring process.

Yeah, you heard it right. Preemptively addressing the potential of you getting laid off when you're in the interview process. Now, not a lot of people might have the guts to do this, but Scott and Richard give their insights and ways to approach this that could give you the confidence to add this to your story and might even give you a leg up in the interview process if you do it right. So make sure you listen to the Surf and Sales wherever you get your own podcast. Now, let's get into our conversation here on Make It Happen Mondays. Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us.

And today's guest is Valerie Fridlind. And Valerie is a really interesting guest here that I think you're really going to enjoy. Because first of all, she's wicked smart. She's actually, she got a doctorate of philosophy and has a PhD in sociolinguistics and is a professor at the University of Nevada in Reno and really focuses on linguistics. And she wrote this book recently, which I think has one of the better titles I've come across, which is Like Literally Dude, Arguing for the Good in Bad English. For those of you who know me and have listened to this podcast, you know that my English is not exactly the best. And I've always wondered, is that a benefit or is that a hindrance to my success?

And a lot of what Valerie talks about in this book is the fact that it is a benefit. It's about relating to people. We actually dive into some of the shady things that people try to do, like mirroring and all these other things that are somewhat impactful and I've been a huge proponent of. So she kind of de-missed some of this stuff, which is really interesting. And then we get into how to leverage language to really connect with people. So I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. And I really do recommend you check out this book. It's coming out, I think, around the time the podcast is launched here. And again, it's called Like Literally Dude. So I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Let's make it happen. Valerie, welcome to the Make It Happen podcast. How are you doing today? I'm great. How about you? I'm doing fantastic. It's one of those days where things are going well. So in this crazy world, I'll take them as they come. Exactly. I know the feeling. Absolutely. So I've been looking forward to this conversation because you got a cool book. Actually, the title, if nothing else, is pretty interesting, like literally, dude. And we're going to be talking about linguistics and how people use language in a lot of ways. And we're going to air that towards a little bit on the sales and the business side of the house. But before we get there, Valerie, talk to us a little bit about your background and kind of how you got into this field in the first place and what drove you to write this book.

I'd love to learn a little bit more about that. Sure. Well, I'm a professor of linguistics, but, you know, I wasn't a five-year-old or a 10-year-old thinking, ah, when I grow up, I'm going to be a linguist. I think I would have shot myself had I actually thought that. But, you know, we all have a weird path to get where we're at. And it turns out to be often the way that you're supposed to have gone, despite what you might have thought at 10 or 12 or 15 about being an astronaut or, you know, an astrophysicist or whatever fantasies you want to have. And mine definitely was not involving linguistics, but it was involving languages. So I had always been interested in languages a lot, probably because my parents were both non-native speakers of English when they moved here.

My father's Belgian, but he's also a Holocaust survivor. So he actually grew up in Israel. So he spoke French as a small child. And then in Israel, obviously, Yiddish and Hebrew. And then my mother was French-Canadian. And so it was an interesting mix of language in my house. My parents always argued in French, which, of course, made that much cooler of a language than English. They also debated things about me in French. So that was a good motivation to learn French. But I did also notice not just how language served a bunch of different functions in my house in terms of when it was used, but I noticed how other people reacted to the way my parents talked. I think accent is something we notice in the United States, actually everywhere.

And sometimes we notice it in a positive way and sometimes in a negative way. And so much of that depends not on the innate habits or skills or thoughts of a speaker, but on our beliefs based on our social preconceptions and prejudices about those types of speakers. So whatever we feel about a group tends to be put on their language. And of course, French speakers, we tend to think of as sort of maybe pretentious, perhaps, but also smart and kind of suave and successful. And so, you know, I had that benefit of my parents' accent being received in that kind of way. They were sort of exotic. I grew up in the South and at the time, I'm not going to age myself, but I'm not a spring chicken. So it wasn't that long.

It wasn't that long ago, but it was long enough ago that foreigners in the South were kind of a novelty. And so people really seem to enjoy their accents and comment on them all the time. But as a child, that actually made me feel uncomfortable because all it did is call out our family as being different in some way. So I think what happened is even though I didn't have any awareness that this was an area of linguistics, I had this already peaked in my head of an area wanting to know more why this happens and wanting to understand why we put such a social value on language, even as a little child from my experiences then when people used to kind of make fun of my parents' accents. But they usually did it in a fun way.

But still, it actually was to me as a child, I didn't find that pleasant when people repeated the way my mom said my name, which is Valerie, but it's French, so it's Valerie, or my brother's name, which was Philip, but it's Philippe. So when people would hear them say our names, they would jokingly say our names back in that way. And it was kind of mocking. And I don't think they meant it that way, but that's how it felt as a child. So, you know, all of this kind of came together. And when I went away to college, I actually picked languages as my major at Georgetown. They had a sort of just a foreign language department. And as part of that major, they required a linguistics course. Actually, they required several.

And so I took a linguistics course, and it was basically like having my eyes open to the power of language and the power of studying the science behind language to understand why the things we say have so much of a social impact. Why are there things that have power and purpose without us even realizing we're using them that way? And so as I sort of saw that open up, that's what led me to pursue linguistics as a PhD and specifically a field called social linguistics, which is sort of what it sounds like. It's the way that society and language interact and how we use different language features to both sort of shape our social identity, but also how language is shaped by our social identity. So it works both ways that we shape society and society shapes us linguistically.

And then I did obviously the academic route. So I was a professor. I had to write a lot of stuff for professoring. And along the way, I found that people asked me the questions that I wasn't answering in my academic books. I was answering the questions that academics and scholars wanted to know. These are deeply theoretical questions, right? That probably would put most non-linguists to sleep. In fact, my last book, Sociophenetics, is probably one of those. So don't run out and get that one. Get the other one, like literally, dude. But I decided, well, why don't I answer those questions? I have the tools. There's clearly an interest. I'm curious myself, I have kids and as they, you know, we're getting older and using all those features like, and literally, and dude, which is really inspired from my kids, that title.

I decided I have the tools and the resources to investigate these and find out exactly why we do them, where they came from, what they're used for, and how they're actually powerful and purposeful, even though we don't tend to think of them that way socially more often. So anyway, that's long story short, how I got to be sitting here. I love it. And, and I'm curious because, you know, we've all been taught that all those weak words or those filler words are bad and accents, you know, I don't think we realize until later on the power of them, right? I'll give you an example. You know, I grew up here in Boston or, you know, actually I didn't grow up in Boston. I grew up about 20 miles Northwest of the, in a nice little suburb, right?

But for some reason it was like, I grew up in Southie because my Boston accent was about as thick as it got. Right. And, and I remember going down to school at university of Maryland and I couldn't get through a single sentence without somebody being like, what did you just say? You know, I'd be like, yeah, kid, I swear to God, let's go to the party and drink some beers. I'm going to fucking, you know, that type of thing. And that's how I talk. And, and I remember getting really, really frustrated because I legitimately couldn't, I almost was like a party trick, right? Cause it was down in university of Maryland. So it was down in the South a little bit and they were like, oh, you know, come over here, listen to this kid from Boston talk.

And I was just like, all right, this isn't cool. And so I, I, I did the whole, spent an entire semester pronouncing every single word that came out of my mouth and speaking very slow and deliberately and definitely. And I felt like an idiot when I was talking in that slow pace, but what it did was it helps me remove it from, or being at least be able to control it. And what's weird. And I'd love your perspective on this is it, it's turned me into a bit of a chameleon in a lot of ways where I pick up on accents without even really thinking about it. So for instance, I've done so much travel internationally where, because if I, if I sniff a European accent, X, Y, Z turns to X, Y, Z without me even thinking about it.

Process turns to process without me thinking about it. And I'm curious, like, is that, is like, is it because of the consciousness or is it because of the proximity to those people who speak that language? Do you just pick that up? And do you just do that to mirror and, and, and connect with people? Cause I, I didn't think I did it consciously. And, and now I pick up on the fact that I'll, I'll use those words around other people. And sometimes I feel weird. Cause I'm like, ah, I'm not Canadian. So why am I saying a, and I'm down South. I'm like, why am I y'alls all of a sudden? And so I, sometimes I feel like I'm insulting, but it's not because I'm doing it on purpose. It's just subconscious.

So could you help me figure out why that transitions happens for me? Sure. I actually, you know, it's a fascinating question and a fascinating process and I, a process. I think, you know, the trick is partially a little bit of the fact that you're very aware of accents and clearly you've done some sort of self-dialect training where you've become very conscious about what features in your speech differ from the norm or the standard or mainstream, uh, dialect and tried to alter your speech in that path. And actually you've done a great job, although they, you're a little, you have little Boston features, but I love those. And in fact, I mean, that's empowering and it gives you a lot of personal identity from those features.

And it also is a great way of, of connection because people from that same area instantly know and who you are and where you came from. And so I think, you know, it's a, I love accents, but, uh, I, I recognize that compulsion to try to change them having grown up in the South. And I don't think I sound very Southern part of it's because my parents weren't Southern, but I also did, you know, I used features like y'all and honey and things like that when I was younger and, um, having been called out for them when I left the South, I too feel like just unconsciously kind of, I moved away from them and sort of tried to affect a different register in my voice. So I think that the bigger question is why we feel the need to do these things and what, what purpose it serves to either move towards or away from someone else's speech.

Um, and I think there are some interesting theories that might explain your shifting towards other people's dialect, even though it's not maybe your authentic dialect, because there is a theory called alignment theory or communication accommodation theory, C-A-T, which is very well known in, um, sort of discourse analysis and linguistics. It's been around for a while, although it's sort of changed sometimes the, the way that it's, it's expressed. But essentially what communication accommodation theory says is that we make moves towards people when we are trying to connect with them in some ways in a sort of semi-conscious way. So we're not sitting there thinking, you know, very sort of in a mercenary way when we're having conversations with someone, oh, I'm going to try to do this so I can connect with you.

I'm going to say process instead of process so that we connect. It's just the natural course of when you're trying to, you know, kind of form a relationship and when you're feeling solidarity that you do things with your body too, that signals closeness and interest and that you're similar in the, in your beliefs and their values. And that's things like, you know, you open up your body, you move closer, you, you've shaked your head, you can make eye contact. All of those things are ways that we show, you know, sort of a personal interest and investment in conversation. But from a linguistic perspective, we also do it by moving towards them in our speech. And that can be very, very subtle things like mirroring vocabulary that they say.

So if we're talking about rabbits, you know, you saw rabbits out and, you know, it sprang and you use the word bunny. So I'm more likely if we're having a good conversation to pick up on that and also use bunny, even if I normally would say rabbit. So it can be at a very superficial level of vocabulary like that. We just start using the same words for things. But actually what we find is it can be even deeper than that. So I might start following your speaking rate. So if you're talking fast, I might talk fast. I might vary my pitch to mirror yours. And I might actually shift towards sound features or syntactic features that you're using. So if you use a lot of contractions or informal language, it is going to be likely that I'll shift towards the same thing.

Because think about how when you're in a conversation with someone who is using very formal, stiff language, you won't end up shifting into more informal laid back language. You're going to actually probably shift forward unless you're like, oh, this person's an asshole. I'm going to actually be really casual to show them like I'm way cooler than you, right? And I don't need this crap. And that's just one way to respond. And that's actually the opposite of accommodation that when you're moving away, that's divergence. And it's actually part of that theory. When we show divergence, meaning we talk less like someone, that actually makes a statement about how you're feeling towards them and orienting towards them.

So I think that is probably what's driving your interest in doing that. But then couple it with your more conscious awareness of how speech has social value and social meaning and you're sort of more conscious awareness than most of how specific features do that because you've been aware of them in your own speech. And that gives you the tools to do it to a higher level than most of us do. So you probably accommodate more than most because you've given yourself the tools to do that. So how much does empathy have to do with it? So there's one part about trying to connect with somebody. And then there's another part about being empathetic or trying to relate so they can understand you more, right?

And I think there's a conscious and a subconscious part of this. But do people, if you're more conscious of that, is that a sign of empathy or no? Are they disconnected? You know, I think they're probably connected. That's not really something we would study per se in linguistics, sort of the socio-emotional states. But we find a lot of connections between the choices we make linguistically and how that sort of tends to get us a more empathetic response from listeners. Also, that helps us make connection. So I think if you see empathy and connection as sort of two sides of the same coin, then I think the answer is definitely yes. We're doing that to make this relationship stronger, to signal solidarity.

You know, I think a great example from the book is the chapter on Dude, which, you know, is a hysterical chapter because if you look at what Dude meant a century ago, it was completely different. And in fact, an insult, not a compliment. But why has Dude become so popular? It's not because it's just this fabulous four-letter word. You know, we have plenty of four-letter words that we can use to call each other out. But because Dude has come to symbolize commiseration, empathy, connection, solidarity in a very safely heterosexual way, which actually is really important to adolescents to make sure they're following these sort of norms for behavior. And it's become very useful because empathy and connection are some of the main drivers of our communicative tendencies.

Interesting. And that's, you know, the mirroring component of this. I mean, we can dive into neurolinguistic programming, right? And how, you know, my very basic understanding of neurolinguistic programming is there's three types of, you know, there's visuals, auditories, and kinesthetics. And just the introduction of that to understand that I was a visual communicator and not, and I always knew I was slightly different than most as far as, because I talk really fast. I use my hands to communicate and I use very visual words. And I would just kind of, as a trainer, for instance, I would just stand up and deliver my show. But when I started to study a little bit more around neurolinguistic programming and realizing the different types of communicators, I started to understand why I might not be connecting with two-thirds of my audience because I'm down this one path.

And so how you would, I've always been curious about neurolinguistic programming and the power of it related to, you know, understanding how people communicate and making sure that your message is heard by as broad of audience as possible. Where are you with NLP? Because I've heard different, I've heard different kind of sides of the equation. Like people, like some people like, oh yeah, like Tony Robbins, right? He's like all about NLP. And then there's other people like, that's just crap. So where are you on like true neurolinguistic programming and using it? Well, I think, you know, for the perspective, if I tell you that NLP to me, to me means natural language processing and it is more computational.

So yeah, the neurolinguistic program that you're talking about is actually not an academic field and it's completely unrelated to linguistics as a theoretical field. You know, I don't know much about it except that I don't think many academics are very supportive of it as a sort of verified, validated research field. So I think, you know, but here's my take, you know, it may not be an academic field. It may not have a lot of studies to back it up, but if people find it effective and helpful in making them better communicators and they see results from that, then what I think a lot of times those types of non-academic arguments of how you should use language, what they sort of tap into is our inherent understanding of why we use language the way we do and how sometimes certain aspects of our language can be better received than others.

So I don't think you have to be a scientist to understand how language works in interactions every day. So from that perspective, I don't know that much about that except that it is fairly discredited in sort of the field I'm in, but I don't think that means you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater because I think a lot of times, and this is what I've learned in my academic career and part of the reason I wrote this book is that I think sometimes the types of things that we study and we research and we do experimental research on, which is sort of the field I'm in, are not exactly the questions that people have when they want to have means to interact in better ways, in more performative ways, in more sort of connecting ways, in more empathetic ways.

Those are questions that are really uninvestigated, I think, in the line of research that a lot of us do because we're into the approving theories. We're into understanding deeper cognition. These are things that are important and they're really important to those questions, but making those connections between the stuff we study and the things people want to know isn't always that really made that clearly. So that was one of my motivations for this book is let me take what we know as researchers and try to connect them with the questions that people ask as speakers and the things that people could use help with as speakers. And I think neurolinguistic programming is an attempt to do the same thing, but just maybe not by scholars.

So, you know, I'm not going to discount it is what I'm saying, but I don't know that there's really a lot of research to back up the claims that it makes. Yeah, that's kind of, I mean, I got that through, yeah, because there's a book out there called Selling with an LP, The Unfair Advantage. And really what it boils down to is just understanding the communication style, whatever that might be of the person that you're trying to communicate with so that you can adjust yours to connect with them to be able to open up the conversation and build trust more effectively and connect and communicate with them more effectively in general. And that's really where I think, you know, from a sales going down to the practicality component of this, you know, there's some two very specific things that I, that were, you know, are you familiar with Chris Voss?

What the difference, the FBI negotiator? Yes, he has a podcast. Is that correct? I think he has a podcast. He's like the Black Swan group. Yes. Yeah. And, you know, he's, he's big into mirroring. And one of the things that he does from a negotiation standpoint is like, say you have an objection and you're like, you look, John, I really appreciate this. Um, but we just, we, we don't have time. We don't have the resources to invest in something like this. So, you know, I got way too many things going on right now. So why don't you call me back in six months? So like, if that's the objection, what he talks about is picking like two or three words that they said and repeating them, but it with upward tone inflection.

So like turning them into a question effectively. So he would say something like, after you would say that objection, you would pause and then say something like, you don't have the resources or don't have the resources. And, and it's weird, this weird forcing function almost for the person to continue to keep talking about, well, yeah. And then obviously the more they talk, the more gap, the more insights you can gather. So how is, how is mirroring something that a sales rep can, can learn, um, consciously to do it? Well, first of all, let's take a step back. Is mirroring something that you think is, is an effective way of getting somebody to open up a little bit more? Well, I think if you think, if you think about low alignment theory or, um, communication accommodation theory, what they say is that we naturally tend to do that.

If we are, our goals in a conversation, our goals in our action are, are matched or paired. Um, so absolutely. I think if we mirror what people say in a way that is authentic and natural, that it does help with that bond. And anytime we feel more sort of, um, close or sort of have a solidarity with someone, even if it's a very superficial one, it makes us more interested in making that communication successful. And what we find is when you look at the research of people that align more or accommodate more, they tend to report a more successful feeling about that conversation. So it's not just that we're also, we're doing it to make the person we're talking to feel better and kind of more aligned with us.

It's actually that we are, as we sort of accommodate to them and they accommodate to us, we will report a more successful encounter overall. So from a sales and marketing perspective, obviously we want good encounters. We want that to come off positively. And when someone walks away, what we want them to remember is not, oh my God, you know, what an asshole. We want them to remember, oh my gosh, what a great conversation. And I think when you walk away with that feeling, it makes doing business probably a much more effective thing later down the road. Um, but I think you want to be careful because, you know, a lot of what I'm talking about in studying is sort of natural occurring alignment. And then if it's inauthentic, it can really come across badly.

And so, you know, I, I think what you want to work on is not these steps to let me pick five words and mirror them because that will not be natural or organic. You want to think, let me try to let go of any preconceptions I have about who this person is and truly, genuinely listen to them and respond in kind. And I think when you go in with a purpose like that, rather than a strategy, um, of like I'm picking five words, I'm going to say them back. It comes across with the same effects, but a lot more natural. So that would be my advice in that kind of case. So does, would that kind of mirroring work? Well, research suggests that accommodation does, but do you want to be able to think, that, you know, planned about it?

I, you know, I think that you, you could, you know, for people that are very good at that kind of thing and have practiced and sort of perform that over and over, they might be good at it. For most of us, someone could tell us to do that, but whether we can actually effectively do it is questionable. So I think for those that are less able to do those kinds of things on command, um, easily, it's better to sort of go in with a larger goal of, I'm going to try to open myself up to this person in a way that makes us feel connected and try to listen to what they would like in a response. But I think the other thing that's really important to mention here is, um, that it has a lot to do with something called homophily and our connectedness with people really, it seems to reflect a lot homophily and homophily is that we are more drawn to people that are like us in appearance, in values, and in beliefs, which ends up why, this is why the idea of corporate culture exists.

Corporate culture exists because you develop similar ideas, similar beliefs, similar alignments, similar views on things, which, you know, the idea is it makes you more effective as a whole. But one of the negatives of building this kind of homophily in all your encounters is that you are more likely to do it with people that are already like you. And what I, I, that's not the problem, right? We don't usually have problems talking to people that are really like us. Where we have problems talking to people and opening ourselves up is when those people are different from, from us, either in their values, their beliefs, or what they look like, how they speak, all of those things. So I think what we really need to work on is how to get away from homophily in our encounters, how to fight that urge to feel more connected to people that are very much like us, and instead be open to a diversity of ideas and types of people in our encounters.

And then we're more successful overall in general. How do you get rid of, like, I think so many of us are conditioned or through experience or whatever to have these preconceived notions of people based on how they speak, to your point, right? In the South, right? I mean, a lot of Northerners, when they hear a Southerner speak, it's automatic, slow, you know, they're not that smart, right? I'm being very broad brushed here. Okay. So, you know, anybody, nobody yell at me here for all my podcasts here. But, like, because I talk so fast, for instance, and because I'm around always people, New York, Boston, who just talk really, really fast. You know, when I am around somebody who is a much slower paced, I've almost been preconditioned to think that because they're slow, they're slow, if you will, right?

And all the stereotypes out there of people's language. So, how do you deprogram yourself from the societal things that we've all been indoctrinated into based on wherever we're from of our perceptions of other people? Well, and that is something that actually is really strongly seen in the way we react to either foreign accented speech or speech that has ethnic markers in it, in addition to regional speech. So, it is not just detrimental when we're, you know, going to visit Nashville or something like that. It's detrimental in our daily lives in so many different ways. First of all, it's hurtful to the people that are always feeling like they're being under recognized for their accomplishments, their contributions, or whatever, because these beliefs we put on them.

It's also a matter of equity. We're having these beliefs that are not based on fact, but based on some prejudice or bias we have against those speakers because of what we believe about that group of speakers, and that gets put on their speech features. So, there are a lot of different reasons why it's good to combat this. The question is how to do it. So, there's been a lot of interesting research because it does seem to strongly affect the way that we respond. So, there was a fascinating study done, actually someone did it for their dissertation recently, and it built on a research study that had been done in the 1980s where speakers or listeners were shown a picture of a speaker, and then they heard a clip of that speaker, and then they were asked to rate that speaker on various qualities as a good speaker, as someone who was knowledgeable about what they were talking about, as being clear, articulate, intelligible, and accented.

So, all these different qualities that we think of in speech. And so, what they did is they had the exact same voice, and both voices were native English speaker, female, but they flashed different pictures in different groups. So, in the earlier experiment, it was a foreign TA they were, and they were testing reactions to TA, teaching assistants, on university campuses because there's a lot of controversy about that. So, they would put sort of a white Anglo speaker up on the screen and play the voice and ask for these ratings. In another room, they put a Chinese woman's picture up on the screen and play the same voice, exactly the same voice as it was heard elsewhere. Well, as you can imagine, the results came out that listeners heard the speech as less clear, less articulate, less intelligible, and more accented when they saw a picture of a Chinese woman.

So, even though they actually heard a voice that was a native speaker that had none of those characteristics, just by seeing or thinking something about that group, their stereotypes about that group affected their ratings. What was even more fascinating is those people performed badly on a following comprehension test compared to the speakers that had seen the white face. So, they heard the exact same content. They heard the exact same voice. All they saw were two different pictures, one with an anticipation of a sort of bias about what that speaker group was like, another one with sort of no bias, and it actually affected how they performed on the test. And then this was repeated later when people were with a South Asian face versus a white face where people were less able to transcribe the speech from the recording where they heard the same recording but saw a South Asian face.

So, these are significant issues. The question is, how do you combat it? Well, that's a difficult question. It depends on the type of accent we're talking about and the type of speakers. One way that has been effective in all of those cases is exposure to a diversity of voices. So, the more we hear a voice, the more we get to know a speaker, the less likely we are to bring in whatever a sort of stereotypes that we have used as formed as cognitive shortcuts, which is what stereotypes are. They're basically, in many cases, helpful cognitive shortcuts that sort of cut out some processing that we have to do. When we force someone to do more processing by having them meet people and have valuable relationships with those people, by being exposed to a wide variety of different voices that are important to them in contexts like business or a personal context, we find that those results actually get better.

So, people perform better in sort of pushing aside the bias that they snap to first and actually hearing those voices more authentically and more organically and more favorably. So, that's one of the solutions that we can adopt. Also, being aware of it, if you tell someone there's a bias that we have cognitively when we hear this kind of speech and we tell them before we play the voices, that actually reduces the bias. So, it doesn't even have to be that extensive. If you actually tell someone you have a bias and this bias is something that's not founded in any kind of reality, you need to work to try to reduce that when you have this encounter with this business person. For example, if you're going to meet someone, you think that before you go in, it should reduce your bias.

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I mean, you can drag and drop stuff. You can create cadences for your prospecting efforts. You can set out forecast reviews. You name it, you can do it with this tool. There is one thing that I've found that this thing can't do, and it combines everything. Sales, marketing, customer success, you name it, it's got it in there, and it gives you deep insights so that you can really figure out where your best clients are and how to approach them and then how to drive them through the sales process with ease. So you've got to check out HubSpot CRM if you haven't used it already. To get started, go to HubSpot.com, and you can sign up for free. Now let's get back to the conversation. So I'm curious on the study itself, was that, did it matter the ethnicity of the people watching the speech?

For instance, if it was a bunch of white people watching an Asian woman and a white woman, I could absolutely see how that was there. But did it matter if like it was a group of Asian women watching it either way? Did that have, or was there a mixed group? Like, I'd be curious to see. Yeah, it was obviously more with Anglo speakers. It was a more significant effect. And I think it was removed when you had more mixture in the population that was listening. But what was really fascinating is that in the more recent research with the South Asian face, they played different accents. So it wasn't always a standard American English speaker that they played. And the accents that they played also had an effect.

So if they played a British English voice, for example, versus an American English voice, that also had an effect on the intelligibility ratings and things like that. So obviously these are, you know, mitigated by factors like that. But we've also found this, actually, there were some interesting studies with housing bias that have been done with African American and Southern varieties. There are older studies and more recent studies. Again, one was a very famous old study that was done in the Bay Area. The other one was a more recent dissertation that was done by a woman at Michigan who looked at the speakers in the South. And what she found is the housing bias that was found in the earlier study, where in that original study, John Baugh, a professor at the time at Stanford, had noticed he was African American, but he didn't have much of an African American dialect when he spoke.

And he noticed when he called about houses for rent in the area as he moved there, that he got a lot of apartments that they were willing to show or houses they were willing to show. But when he showed up and was African American, all of a sudden, a lot of times the houses were rented. And he thought it was because I sounded white that they said yes. So he did an experiment where he had different accented voices. I think one was the Hispanic accent. The other one was an African American accent and then a standard voice. And he played, he had people, you know, call to rent the apartment, just switching the guys that they used. And by guys, I mean the accent. And found that with the white voice, substantially more housing appointments were made than with any of the ethnic voices.

So a woman researcher, Kelly Wright, redid that recently and looking at Southern voices, African American voices and standard English voices in the South and found something very similar. Again, that we, you know, even without realizing it, that sort of idea of empathy and connection and homophily, we tend to push away those that are least like us. But what was interesting, and to your point that you asked earlier, when they were in predominantly Black neighborhoods or predominantly Southern neighborhoods, it didn't affect the results nearly as much. Now, it didn't mean that white speakers didn't get the showings, but African American and Southern speakers didn't, weren't harmed by having that accent.

So I think the point here is these things are very real problems that we face in all facets of our life, from a personal level to a business level. We find this in hiring, that a lot of people are told that they need to submit extra materials or that the job is full when they call with accented speech. And that's not for an accented speech necessarily. A lot of times that's just dialectal speech. And that was one of the reasons I wrote the book, because most of these beliefs that we have are actually based on inaccurate information historically and scientifically. And if we, if we can learn why we have these biases, it can really help us then go forward either in a corporate life or a personal life with making better decisions and having better relationships with people.

I think that's, you know, the thing I've always, you know, even in addition to linguistics, you know, even your name, for instance, if you have a, uh, a foreign or a different sounding name, you get, you know, on your resume, you could have the exact same resume. But if, for instance, if your name is John, you'll get a lot of callbacks. But if your name is Tyrone, again, exact same resume. I think it's like a 20% compared to a quote unquote Anglo-Saxon sounding name, which is just brutal to, you know, I mean, the, the hurdles that we need to go through because of how indoctrinated or not we, like I'm a privileged one of a very basic white male name. I mean, I even have the tattoo on my arm that says, when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression because, you know, privilege is not necessarily about, uh, you know, silver spoon in my mouth type of thing.

It's the fact that I don't have to worry about, you know, what I get dressed like in the morning so that I don't get sexually harassed or getting pulled over or getting, you know, turned down for a job because I sound different or my name is different or any of that stuff. And I think that's more something that we just continue to fight here with, with how indoctrinated a lot of this stuff is and just historically, and you say a lot of this is historically false, but if it's historically false, why is it, why is it so ingrained? Well, a lot of that has to do with the rise of what's called the complaint culture that happened around the 18th century. Um, and you know, I, I think the idea that we are more aligned with those in our own group has been around forever.

If you go back to the times of even old English, what you find is it was a clan man mentality. It was a very Germanic sort of code of honor and you fought for your clan and there were blood feuds. I mean, it was a pretty harsh place to live. And if someone effect offended someone in your clan, the entire clan had to make sure that person paid. And that's why, you know, people killed each other constantly because of these blood feuds and they were all based on kinship and sort of solidarity within a group as opposed to other groups. So I think we have done this for, you know, millennia where we see people in our group as worthy and people outside of that as not. But what we tend to forget is the reason that language has evolved the way it has is not because there are inherent betterness with any forms, just like ethnic groups.

There's no inherent betterness with any ethnic group. It's that those that have power and privilege and control the institutions get to decide what the language is. And, you know, there's a joke in linguistics that what is a language? Well, it's anything with an army and a Navy because that is what becomes the language. So, you know, the English that we speak today that we think of as standard actually was just the London dialect, the East Midland dialect at the time when the printing press started and when power shifted to London and it became a center of economic and cultural prestige. And once a place gets something like that gets associated or once a people or a place get associated with power and prestige on a social level and an economic level, then that just just sort of naturally creates a desire for others that see that within their sights to aspire if that's what they they want.

You know, some people will never want that. They they want something different. But the vast majority of people want to establish a comfortable life, economically, socially privileged life. And so you aspire towards the norms and the models of whoever's in power, whoever's culturally most sort of interesting. And that's how English, the English we use today came to be the standard. So there was nothing about that English that was actually better. And in fact, if you look at the development English of English up to that point, English was a vernacular language altogether. People don't realize that English was a language of the common people. It was called a vulgar language until about 1600. And that was when finally English came into its own.

And we had to actually borrow a ton of words to make it capable of doing all the sort of academic discourse that we were doing to talk about science, to talk about medicine, to talk about law. We had to borrow and make up new words. And that's why Shakespeare is credited with so many word coinages, because he lived in the era when we had no words to describe these things because English hadn't been allowed to have access to those areas. So, you know, I think it's kind of funny that the people that come from a language that is vulgar to begin with have all these ideas about vulgarity of other people. So that's what I mean by it's historically inaccurate. That's that's not why English has no inferior inferiorness or superiority.

And, you know, if you want to look at history, we're actually pretty inferior language when it comes to power and prestige for centuries. So, you know, it's just a funny way of only seeing our own perspective from the moment that we're living in. Yeah, that's not the truth. Let's let's let's let's stay on the vulgar track here, because, you know, I saw a statistic gone. So gong in our industry, it's a call recording software, and they do some really interesting stuff because they analyze millions and millions of calls that go through their system and they tie it to revenue and success. And so they they're able to extract with artificial intelligence what the best reps do versus what average reps do.

And a lot of it has to do with language, which is really interesting. And one of the studies that they are one of the reports that they put out was about how swearing actually increases your likelihood of closing the deal. So if you swear in the sales process, you actually have a higher rate of closer than if you don't. But there's a very specific nuance to it, which is they have to swear first. So this kind of goes back to that that like where I can't just start dropping the F-bomb here and there like that'll probably if you're not one of those people, that'll offend you really, really fast and I'll lose the opportunity. But as soon as you let a swear drop in the conversation, and obviously, I'm not going to jump right on it and say the exact same thing.

But if I then loosen up a little bit later on and drop a swear, there's a higher likelihood. So is that let's let's stay with this vulgar language, because these I mean, even the title of your book, like literally do, these are all words that we've been taught are not really that strong. They don't help. So how do these words help? I mean, literally, I used to use the word literally like it was going out of style. I mean, everything was literally and I was using it in all the wrong context. I think a lot of people use those. But how do these words like do that type of thing? How do they help us in a business? I mean, outside of relating and maybe mirroring those people, how can we think about these in a positive light as opposed to just trying to rip them out of our vocabulary so that we don't have these filler words and we just pause in the right moments and are very thoughtful with our vocabulary, which kind of takes away our personalities.

Right. Well, I think, you know, that's part of it. When we get to more formal language, the trick is it basically does kill personality because we've taken out everything that makes us somebody that we can relate to. But the interesting thing about literally used non-literally, which is, I think, what people dislike about it, is you're in good company. Jane Austen, James Fenimore Cooper, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, all of them use literally non-literally. If you go back to the earliest reference we can find in literature to a non-literal use of literally, it's actually in the 1700 in Francis Burney's book where I think the history of Emily Montague, where she says, talks about women at a party.

It was literally as if to feed among the lilies, which is obviously not, you know, zombie literature. So we're not eating people. It was clearly a non-literal use of literally. So, you know, again, flipping the script on that one, historically, it's actually been used that way for centuries. So, you know, this idea that we're really tied to this one meaning of it is pretty funny. But I think there are a number of ways to combat this idea that these are bad language. History shows us that language has always changed. I mean, if you've ever read Beowulf, you know this, right? Because that was painful to read and unintelligible because it was in a basically different language. That's Old English.

We can't even understand Old English, which tells us that language has evolved much more than throwing a like or literally into our speech. It's vastly different than what it used to be. And in fact, the last 200 years has seen much less change in English than the previous 800. So, you know, this idea that we're worried about these things, meaning, you know, our speech is going to pot or to hell is just wrong, first of all. But, you know, I think the bigger issue is our beliefs about what colloquial language says about a speaker. And from a business perspective, what we find is while going into an interview, a job interview where you don't know the corporate culture, you don't know the language that's expected, you can't go wrong by ascribing to more formal speech.

Because first of all, I think we often associate formality with respect so that when we are in a context where we don't know someone, we don't want to call them Jack, right? I mean, if you, if someone comes in and meets you and, you know, they might be your boss at some point and you're trying to impress them, calling them by the first name when they haven't invited you to do something is too intimate and informal. In fact, can be offensive. So we don't do that because we know that people might misconstrue our intentions as being negative. So I think a lot of the same principles go into our language use. It's not so much that those things are bad. They're not. They're just different and they're different in a certain population.

So if you're a millennial or younger, chances are you use these features. You use literally, non-literally. You're definitely using like. I can guarantee you 100% you are using like and you probably use dude, at least with your friends, right? So you're using these features. The trick is that we have to understand where it's appropriate in a business context to use those features with people that have maybe higher status to us. And as higher status speakers in a conversation, we also have to understand that those features can do work for us in ways that we probably don't realize because we dismiss them as bad as bad as bad as bad as bad as bad as bad as bad as bad as bad as bad as bad as bad as bad as bad.

So like, let's take like, which is, of course, a despised word. I can't tell you how many people have come up to me and said, can you tell people to stop using like? And if I had the power to do that kind of thing, I would be a very rich woman, but I don't have that power, nor would I want to in that case, because like actually serves a really interesting function. And it has shifted its use as we have shifted as a society. What like does, it helps us sort of incorporate a subjective sensibility into what we say. So the word like is essentially something that sets up a comparison. So, you know, he has eyes like the sky, right? When we say something like that, a simile, what we're doing is saying one thing is similar to another thing.

We're setting up a comparison, right? But what's important about that? We're saying they're in exact matches, right? By using a simile, what I'm signaling is my knowledge of the fact that these are not exact things. They're similar things. And we set up a comparison. Well, that's originally what like was used for. But around the early modern period, which is around 1500, 1600, we start to see like used in some context where set up not just similarity, but estimation or approximation. So it took on this additional meaning that it's just not saying two things might be like each other. It's sort of approximating something that was sort of has a general similarity to what we're saying. So it's more approximate.

And that was where you see like, you know, something like I was like running 10 miles a day where it's sort of you're estimating what you were doing. And what I'm signaling to you is that I'm not violating any truth conditions by telling you something that might not be verbatim true, right? Just like when I said he said versus he was like what I'm signaling by that shift between a quotative like he said the verb to say and a quotative verb like like to be like is I'm signaling to you a subjective sensibility. And I'm allowing you as a listener to understand what I'm saying here is not this was verbatim a quote by this person I'm signaling here is a thought that might have been featured here is something a gist of what he said.

Now look at this interesting pattern we find when we study how speakers say tell stories and how they alternate between the verb to say and the verb be like what we find is they use the verb to say more often when they're talking about other people and the verb be like when they're using a first person pronoun I or we and what would be the benefit of that the benefit of that is that you are helping people shift between narrative roles right you are allowing perspective taking by shifting between these two different forms these verb forms so I when I'm using someone else's perspective I use one verb to indicate this is someone else's perspective but when I shift to myself and I'm indicating my own perspective my own take on something I shift to I was like so it's actually helping you alert a listener to these narrative roles that are differing and these different perspectives that you're taking which is actually a pretty valuable asset so what I'm saying here and and like actually has a bunch of these different really powerful purposes so by dismissing it simply as a speaker not knowing what they're talking about which is what I hear people say that's actually completely false they very much know what they're talking about and they're communicating to you a nuance of meaning that you're just not getting why are you not getting it because you're so busy policing their language and not and dismissing it as an important and not good speech that you're not actually listening to the value and the message that that person is bringing to you how is this helpful or hurtful in a business context well if you have younger speakers particularly they're going to use like if you're dismissing them because of their use of like what you're doing is dismissing ideas that are valuable to your business you're also dismissing a way to connect with the younger generation so you know if all of us would love that we would keep having new business generated well we're not going to do that if we're not forward thinking enough to say what is the next generation want and how do they communicate and if we are reflective on that what we'll discover is they communicate using a different set of resources than we use and if we don't start embracing them rather than dismissing them we're going to be left behind yeah I couldn't agree more there's I think there's again comes back to that preconceived notion of what language should be how should you speak and in your your perceptions of education or intellect or any of that one last question for you one phrase that does drive me nuts I gotta ask which is to be honest with you uh is that in a positive because because that does come across as well you tend to lie otherwise and I appreciate you being honest with me now but does that send a negative because I've been called out on that before a lot of executives I know have been called out on that before where they say look well to be honest with it I've purposely switched that to well let me be direct right because a lot of times I'm not direct I'm you I try to be honest as much as I possibly can but a lot of times I'm not direct or to be frank with you or something like that so is that one something that because I've heard it called out on me I now I I now put an association on you that you might not be being honest with me when you say something like that well I think that's along the same lines as people that get upset when someone says um thank you and another person responds oh no problem a lot of people get upset at that because they think it insinuates there was a problem but I you know what's what here's the message for both of those what we tend to have a problem with is when things are shifting in ways that maybe we don't empathize or understand where they're coming from with these new forms they're using and when you say no problem what that means is you're actually responding to a different politeness function that society has shifted towards so when you say you're welcome what you're doing is attending to someone else's needs to be liked and admired when you say no problem what you're doing is attending to their need not to be imposed upon right that we're saying like oh you didn't impose upon me because we value freedom and so when someone violates that it's a big deal by telling someone you didn't violate anything by doing that it was not a problem that's actually a genuine response to something that some people are more aware of now I think to be honest it's the same thing they're actually a woman named Sally Tagliamonte who's in Canada has been recently just doing research into the rise of truth attestations which is what that is to be honest or honestly these things that we're putting as adverbials kind of to mitigate the things we're going to say but what you're taking that out as is a statement that this is to be understood in terms of meaning of those words what speakers are meaning by that is what I'm signaling by using this to sort of modify my statement is I'm signaling that I'm being genuine that I'm actually reaching deep and telling you something from my heart something intimate so it's really a matter of interpretation I mean do you really think people are going to tell you I usually lie but right now I'm going to be honest I mean it's sort of a weird thing to say that people I mean I I sometimes wonder where who these people are talking to that think that you know oh people are being insulting when they tell me no problem and people are lying when they tell me to be honest I think what we do is we we don't understand how much context and how much connection comes into our speech and what's what's context and connection to one person may have a different context and connection to another person and what you're talking about is when one person is talking to another one and they don't connect on that level but it's also pedantic and annoying to then state well it's because you're lying to me I mean seriously you don't actually think that right that's again being dismissive without reason and it sort of goes back to this whole 18th century complaint tradition that if you're don't if you don't do the same things I do and I have power in a situation then you're wrong and I'm right and that's not a way to live or to talk if we actually genuinely want communication that said in places where you don't know if someone has the same take on to be honest I know that you're not the only person that that annoys I actually have heard many people say that it's probably wise in situations where you're not aware of how it's going to be taken to try to limit that and come up with a different you could say well genuinely here's how I feel that might be a better way to rephrase that so can you rephrase it absolutely does it really mean what people claim it means not not at all absolutely well for that this is fascinating I could keep having this conversation for because I got all sorts of questions about my language because I've never been one to uh uh nobody's ever accused me of being a linguistic you know master here because I usually swear quite a bit and uh and uh very casual with my vocabulary but at the end of the day I you know authenticity is what people have always said you know for me personally has been to a certain degree their attraction to me is because I don't speak at the highest level if you will of what other people would expect of an executive or any of that stuff and so I always thought it was a positive uh understanding it is the important part though and understanding how your language affects other people and likewise I think is critical here so thank you so much for this Valerie I really appreciate it absolutely it was fun to talk to you enjoyed the conversation great well thanks for having me tell me what's that I said great thanks for having me it was great oh thank you and and so tell people where they can find uh so the books out tell people where you can find out more information about you in the book and everything else first of all I have to I love the way you have your owl vowel about you it's just great see I love your accent and and I think you should take your r's back away potty instead of party it's awesome okay but that that said your drinks exactly okay next time we'll have a cocktail hour yeah um that said the book is like literally dude arguing for the good and bad english and it's available anywhere you buy books um or of course on amazon you can also find me and some of my other work at my website which is um valeriefriedland.com I'm sure you'll have that in the show notes so I probably don't need to spell it I also write a monthly blog for psychology today language in the wild so if you're interested in seeing more about what I think about language and what linguists have to offer you can look at that too and I'd love to have you sign up for my newsletter absolutely I love it and uh yeah and everybody go check that out I love the premise I love the concepts here and and I think it's really important for us to pay more attention to our language and not judge people so much on there so again thank you so much valerie for coming on I appreciate it absolutely and uh everybody else listening thank you so much hopefully you picked up something and got you to think a little bit differently about what would you use and the perception that you have of other people based on theirs and look like I say all the time at the end of these podcasts no matter how bad your day went or how bad you think it's going go out there and make somebody smile today because no matter how bad you think your day is going if you make somebody smile you know you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now so thank you all very much and I will see you on the other side I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests we're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now and I can't thank you enough now to keep the momentum going it would mean the world to me if you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network also check out my new website at www.johnm as in michael barrows.com where you'll find even more ways to engage there's a ton of free content and you can also get trained from me directly as an individual or for your team look I'm out there selling every day just like you are and I'm doing my best to stay on top of all the latest trends and technology so if you're looking to level up and you give a about this profession of sales let's connect and let's make this happen together