We have words for selling, words for buying, words for making words
But we need words for thinking
We have words for killing, words for sleeping, words for tickling
But we need words for loving.
We have machines for writing words, dictaphones tape recorders microphones and telephones
We have words for making noise... Words for talking we have no more


Gianni Rodari wrote this in his second book of nursery rhymes in 1985. He had already understood it all…
We are losing words. Not in the sense that someone has hidden them in a secret place, or that one morning, on opening the dictionary, we might discover that a few pages have vanished between “authoritative” and “authoritarian”, but because the number of words we habitually use seems to be shrinking steadily, just as the opportunities, means and tools through which we communicate are multiplying.
We write more than we used to, send dozens of emails, messages, comments and brief communications every day, attend meetings in person or remotely, share presentations and documents, yet this proliferation of possibilities does not seem to have brought a corresponding improvement in quality. On the contrary, the speed at which we are expected to respond, the conviction that brevity is always and invariably a virtue, and a certain impatience with any line of reasoning that requires more than a few seconds of attention are probably training us to use fewer words, often the same ones over and over, in the hope that they will suffice for every occasion.
A sort of linguistic wardrobe stripped down to the essentials, in which a white shirt, a dark jacket and a pair of jeans are expected to see us indiscriminately through a board meeting, a wedding dinner and a Sunday stroll.
The paradox is that, just as words grow fewer, their weight increases. This happens above all in complex organisations, where a carelessly chosen word can have far more significant consequences than the person who uttered it imagines.
Synonyms do not have the same effect
Ultimately, it might seem merely a question of nuance.
A person can be described as cautious or resistant to change, determined or stubborn, flexible or inconsistent. A manager can be demanding or authoritarian, a team member independent or individualistic, a colleague direct or aggressive. In many cases, the behaviour observed is exactly the same, yet changing the adjective used to describe it is enough to alter the judgement completely.
And a judgement, once made, has a natural tendency to turn into a label, which then sticks so firmly to the person that it becomes almost impossible to remove. As time goes by, we will no longer remember which behaviour prompted that assessment, but we will be certain that this is simply what that person is like.
Indeed, one need only attend a meeting devoted to assessing staff to realise how much vocabulary can steer the discussion. If someone says that a team member is “not ready yet”, they are rarely asked what the person is not ready for, which skills they lack or what experience they would need to become ready. They are not ready, and that is enough. The description acquires the standing of a clinical diagnosis, despite the absence of tests, medical records and, in some cases, even the patient.
The expression “they don’t have the right profile” also has a fascinating ability to shut down any discussion. The profile, a mysterious entity endowed with almost supernatural powers, allows an application to be rejected, advancement to be blocked or a person to be excluded from a project without anyone having to explain which qualities are required and which are missing. They don’t have the right profile. They probably left it in their other jacket.
When the label comes before the person
The problem becomes even clearer when words no longer merely describe a reality, but begin to construct it.
If we describe someone as uncooperative, we will inevitably interpret their behaviour through that lens. If they do not speak in a meeting, we will think they do not want to contribute; if they do speak, that they want to impose their views; if they express a doubt, that they are working against us; if they approve the proposal, that they are doing so purely out of opportunism. At that point, the person has little chance of escaping the role we have assigned them, because whatever they do will end up confirming the initial judgement.
It is the reassuring mechanism through which we can almost always prove ourselves right, especially when we are the ones choosing the evidence.
In organisations, moreover, certain words have an astonishing ability to spread. A judgement voiced in an informal conversation can find its way into a meeting, migrate to an appraisal form, reappear in a development review and follow the person for years, perhaps without anyone ever checking where it came from or which actual incident it referred to.
Organisational complexity acts as an amplifier. The more levels, functions and people are involved, the more reality has to be recounted by one person to another, with the risk that at every stage it loses a nuance and acquires a judgement. Rather like the old game of Chinese whispers, except that at the end nobody laughs at the absurd sentence that has reached the last player, because that sentence may have helped determine a promotion, a transfer or an exclusion.
People at the centre, provided they are called resources
Companies devote a great deal of time to choosing the words through which they describe themselves. They define values, write mission statements, draw up cultural manifestos and declare their intention to put people at the centre, an expression now so widespread that it would be interesting to know where people had been placed before.
At the same time, however, those people are still often called “resources”, a decidedly convenient and apparently harmless term, but one that groups them, without much ceremony, alongside economic, financial, technological and, if you like, even water resources. All important, of course, but not necessarily endowed with aspirations, fears, professional pride or children to take to school.
This is not about banning the term, nor about launching a lexical battle likely to produce more manifestos, more working parties and a new cross-functional group tasked with identifying a more inclusive word by next quarter. It is, however, about understanding that language often reveals what we really think, sometimes with greater honesty than we would wish.
Thus, if we call a person we have decided to do without “surplus”, we are using a word that shifts attention from the individual to a numerical excess. If we speak of “efficiency improvements”, we might perhaps mean better processes, but quite often someone will discover that efficiency consists in the disappearance of their desk. And when a reorganisation is described as “challenging”, it is always worth asking for whom, because there is a certain difference between taking on a professional challenge and receiving a communication that begins “as part of the new organisational structure”.
Circumlocutions are sometimes necessary to handle sensitive subjects respectfully, but they become dangerous when they serve not to care for people, but to shield the speaker from responsibility for what they are saying.
I made myself perfectly clear
Another very widespread conviction is that responsibility for understanding lies chiefly with the listener.
“I made myself perfectly clear” is, in fact, one of the phrases most frequently used by those who have not been understood, and it already contains a convenient verdict: if the message has not got through, the problem cannot lie with the person who formulated it so perfectly, so it must necessarily lie with whoever failed to pay sufficient attention, lacks the appropriate tools or, an explanation always ready to hand, does not want to understand.
Yet communicating does not simply mean uttering words, but ensuring that meaning travels from one person to another in reasonably similar condition. On its journey, however, that meaning passes through the relationship between the speakers, their previous experiences, expectations, fears, power relations and emotional state at that moment.
The same sentence spoken by a colleague or by one’s manager can carry an entirely different weight. “Come and see me when you have a moment”, said by a colleague, may herald a coffee; spoken by the boss at nine in the morning, it risks undermining the entire day’s productivity, because until the meeting the person will have time to imagine a reorganisation, a dismissal and, in the more creative cases, even the company closing down.
In complex settings, then, it is not enough to choose words that are formally correct. We need to ask ourselves how they will be heard, what interpretations they might prompt and how much consistency there is between what we say and what people see happening.
Because if a company talks constantly about trust but multiplies its checks, celebrates mistakes as opportunities to learn but immediately looks for someone to blame, or invites everyone to express their opinions freely only to remember precisely who did so, it is not the language that is wrong. It is the behaviour that makes it unconvincing.
The cost of the wrong words
Choosing words carefully does not mean becoming so cautious that we no longer say anything, constructing sentences so sterile that they resemble patient information leaflets, or replacing clarity with an endless succession of circumlocutions in which meaning, exhausted, eventually gets lost.
It means taking responsibility for the consequences.
As Albus Dumbledore, the wise character in Harry Potter, said, “Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”
A word can acknowledge or belittle, clarify or confuse, open a discussion or cut it short before it even begins. It can turn a mistake into an experience to work on or a fault to defend oneself against, dissent into a contribution or a problem of alignment, a request for help into a display of weakness.
Nor is a rich vocabulary enough, because it is possible to use a great many words without truly choosing a single one. Linguistic precision does not consist in reaching for the most complicated term, but in finding the one best suited to the context, the person and the meaning we want to convey.
Perhaps, then, the gradual loss of words should concern us for more than cultural reasons alone. In an organisation, having fewer words also means having fewer tools with which to distinguish, interpret and understand. If all we have are “right” and “wrong”, “good” and “poor”, “aligned” and “not aligned”, every complex behaviour will be forced into a box that is too small, inevitably leaving something important outside.
Personally, I continue to think that words are among the most powerful working tools we possess, despite their almost never appearing in company inventories and nobody yet having thought of assigning them an asset number. They can bring distant functions closer together, rebuild trust, make a difficult decision comprehensible and even persuade someone to accept it without agreeing with it.
But they can also do the opposite.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves how much attention we give to the words we choose. Because a wrong word can always be explained, corrected, put into context and perhaps even forgiven.
But it cannot be unsaid.