In this episode, host Beth Cougler Blom talks with Dr. Suzanne Wertheim, author of The Inclusive Language Field Guide. They explore how facilitators and educators can develop the habit of using inclusive language and why it’s critical to their work. Suzanne shares practical strategies for identifying problematic language, addressing resistance, and shifting perspectives to create more inclusive learning environments.
Beth and Suzanne also talk about:
- How facilitators can invite feedback to improve their language use
- The importance of optimizing language for inclusivity and avoiding erasure
- How to address resistance to inclusive language in a productive, respectful manner
- How practice and mindfulness can make inclusive language second nature
Engage with Dr. Suzanne Wertheim
- worthwhileconsulting.com
- suzannewertheim.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzannewertheim-inclusivelanguageexpert/
Other Links from the Episode
- Foundational Ally Skill series
- Universal Design
- BCcampus
- Curb cut effect
- Crip linguistics: Crip linguistics is a new subfield that brings a rigorously scientific lens to the study of language produced by disabled people and about disabled people.
Connect with the Facilitating on Purpose Podcast
- Follow Facilitating on Purpose on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube
- facilitatingonpurpose.com
Connect with Beth Cougler Blom
- Give feedback or suggest upcoming show topics or guests at hello@bcblearning.com
- Visit bcblearning.com to explore Beth’s company’s services in facilitation and learning design
- Purchase a copy of Beth’s book, Design to Engage
- Follow Beth on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn
Podcast production services by Mary Chan of Organized Sound Productions
Show Transcript
[Upbeat music playing]
[Show intro]
Beth
Welcome to Facilitating on Purpose, where we explore ideas together about designing and facilitating learning. Join me to get inspired on your journey to becoming and being a great facilitator wherever you work. I’m your host Beth Cougler Blom.
[Episode intro]
Beth
Hello and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining me on this episode today. I’m really pleased to be sharing a conversation with you here with Dr. Suzanne Wertheim. Suzanne is a national expert in inclusive language and she’s written a book called The Inclusive Language Field Guide. It was published in 2023. I just discovered it though. I was browsing my local bookstore not so long ago and this book title jumped out at me. I picked it off the shelf and flipped through it and it just became one of those books that I had to bring home with me. And I read it really quickly because what Suzanne talks about in the book is so relevant to, well, all of our work situations and all of our life situations actually, but particularly if we’re in the fields of learning design and facilitation, like we talk about in this podcast. This episode could have easily gone into two episodes because Suzanne and I did have so much to talk about. Of course, her book goes into so much more detail than we were able to get into in our conversation today. But I appreciated her being with me and taking the time to share her deep knowledge about inclusive language. And I hope you enjoy the show.
Beth
Suzanne, so nice to have you with me. Thanks for joining me on the podcast today.
Suzanne
Thank you so much for the invitation. I’m genuinely happy to be here.
Beth
I’m happy you’re here too. I haven’t actually had too too many authors come onto the podcast yet, maybe a couple, and I love books and I love to read and I really loved your book, so I can’t wait to dive in and chat about it with you more.
Suzanne
There’s something so unilateral about a book, and I think we’ll talk about that later. Like the idea of language that goes out to an unknown audience and how you have to prep for it. With a book, it’s that times a thousand, right? And so I threw it out there in the world, and unlike a room where I can see people, or even a Zoom meeting where I can see a few people, I have no idea what the reception’s gonna be, so literally every single time people tell me that they enjoyed the book. It makes me so happy because I get so little feedback compared to how much I had to create it.
Beth
It’s true. You don’t see that when I was in my local bookstore and I was perusing the writing section and you know, you pull these things off the shelf and something about it speaks to you. So yours is called the Inclusive Language Field Guide. And I recognize so much that inclusive language and being inclusive in general is a big part of my life and my work right now. And there’s always new learning within that. So it did jump out at me and, uh, I just can’t wait to see what else you’re thinking about inclusive language.
Suzanne
Yes. And I also want to say, I mean, the people listening to your podcast, I don’t think will be resistant. But here in the States, we’re definitely at a moment of pushback, of rejection, of resistance. I actually have been thinking about resistance that people have to truths about language since the 90s when I started being a teaching assistant. I started working as a teaching assistant and I would present information, you know, just peer reviewed articles about here’s some stuff about how language works about gender and about race. And I would see this resistance that people would have to the realities of language, especially when there were power dynamics involved, marginalization, oppressed people, bias, there would be a lot of resistance.
So here in the U.S. we’re getting resistance to words like diversity, equity, inclusion. So I do want to point out that there are other ways to think about inclusive language for people, especially if you want to talk to people who might be resistant. I want to offer you other kinds of framings like ‘optimized language’ or ‘customer friendly language’ or ‘user friendly language’ or ‘strategic language’, because it’s also all of those things. And a lot of people come to my book or come to my keynotes or workshops with presuppositions about what I’m going to talk about. And when I talk about things like parental status, or if you were an essential worker at the pandemic, or so many things that aren’t about race or gender or sexual orientation, they’re very surprised because they haven’t realized how much thinking about who is in your audience needs to permeate all of your language use. They really thought it was much more limited and much more political.
Beth
And it’s not just about race and culture. I’m glad you said that because you’re right. There’s so many examples that you have in your book that go far, far beyond just race and culture, don’t they? And I think just as a woman that’s in my middle age, that there are things about language that I consistently uncover for myself too, even about being a woman in the world or how people talk about women. Like there’s so many things that it’s a broad, broad brush that you’ve tried to bring to this topic, right? It’s very big.
Suzanne
It is, and you never know where you’re going to hit something where another person’s perspective or another person’s experience is different from yours. I mean, you can predict. I mean, my book is basically like I’ve triaged for readers and said, here are the top places. Don’t freak out. Language is very big. The world is very big. Don’t freak out. Here are the top problems that I see. And here’s how you can fix them. I have done that. But then there are things that come up that you might not expect. And so it’s also good to have a mindset coming in of maybe even front loading with people and saying, there may be times that my language does not reflect reality or doesn’t incorporate your perspective or is erasing people. And I want to tell you up front, I’m always open to hearing about that because we need to be constantly learning. I mean, if you don’t learn, you’re stultifying, right? I mean, things, times change, we change, culture changes, and your life changes, the people you know change. And I think that part of discussing inclusive language as behavioural principles, which I do, rather than a list, a closed set of bad words and good words, I think is also there to encourage a mindset of gentle curiosity and exploration rather than fear and resistance, which I do see more than I would like.
Beth
Yeah, more than I would like as well. I’m glad you started with that kind of invitation to, I’m gonna put it in context of working with groups. So we facilitators, we faculty members, I know you have been a faculty member in the past for many years. So even when we start working with groups and stand up in front of that class, you’re saying, let’s make an invitation. Okay, if I say something that doesn’t work for you, please come and share with me about how I could do this differently or that gentle curiosity is a nice way to look at that.
Beth
Because we can never nail it 100% of the time with our language, can we? As things evolve and change?
Suzanne
And there are things where you’re at a great advantage with written communication because there’s the time. There’s the time. So in my book, I talk about the difference between like prepping for an event, a planned event, and then having a well-stocked refrigerator if people come over, right? So if you’re on autopilot, you have to really train yourself. It’s much harder to be well-stocked on autopilot. So the thing that just comes out of your mouth is the most welcoming or the most accurate or the most inclusive variant, but when you have something that’s in a written format, oh, the luxury of time as long as you have it to do the checklist. Speaking of faculty, something this morning reminded me of a problem that I produced myself in my large intro course.
So I used to teach 300, 400 people at a time because I taught this big intro to linguistic anthropology course. And my teaching assistants were not given necessarily an invitation, but I was very egalitarian. And I tried to be a kind boss to them. And so they felt really very comfortable giving me feedback. And one time there was a question about, and I was talking about English isn’t the official language of the U.S. and how it had been multi-lingual, especially multi-lingual pre-contact, but multi-lingual even from the colonial era. There were multiple colonial languages and how it had different religions. And I managed to talk about Muslims as if there were no Muslims in the room, right? As if followers of Islam were only people who weren’t in the room. Like I was acknowledging them, but I hadn’t gone that full step. Even though I knew full well that I had people in the class from Pakistan and Bangladesh and other places. It just, my ways of thinking about Muslims was not the people in my close group, right? And this is even after I did a year of dissertation fieldwork with Muslims in Russia, right?
So there are these habits that we have from growing up. If you’re raised with no, I was raised in a very segregated, very specific kind of suburb of New York. And the way that I was raised to talk about and think about people still sticks with me a lot of the time. I hadn’t prepped myself. If I had written something down, I would have had the capacity to fix it. So, I just want to share with you that these are, and so my TAs were like, we got Muslims in the class. And I’m like, oh my God. So yeah, you never know what’s gonna come out of your mouth. Even as you’re trying to be more inclusive, you can still not be working at the best practices level.
Beth
Oh, it’s so true. I’ve definitely had things fall out of my mouth. Either they’re just at the tip of my tongue and I’m about to say them. And I go, wait a minute. I don’t think I can say that. That’s not something I should say anymore, you know, but it’s there. It’s deep. It’s from my past and my culture and everything. Or it’s that I’ve actually said it. And then I realize the same thing. And so these things run deep, don’t they? And how do we get out of that? How do we reform ourselves so that we can catch and those words don’t fall out of our mouth? What works for people?
Suzanne
So there’s a two-part process. The first is identifying through triage that the top problematic things that you’re gonna be most susceptible to or that will be most painful or problematic for the audience that you’re working with. So really triage and focus and then practice. And then part two is creating a mindset and a practice where you are open to feedback. So let me go back to the first one. I mean, especially everyone who facilitates learning where you think about that process of somebody comes from a place where they don’t know something, then you bring them to a place of passive knowledge. And then finally, you want to bring them to the place of active knowledge and practice and praxis, right? So how do you get there? A lot of people, because I’m talking about English in my current work, I do have global clients and I’ve worked in multiple languages and researched multiple languages. And my work is based on multiple languages in multiple countries. I just have written specifically about mostly American English, some North American English, right?
People have this idea that they have to put in effort and practice and they know they’ll make mistakes acquiring a foreign language, a language that they’ve learned after puberty so they’re not really going to be a native speaker. But for some reason, when it’s their native language that they grew up with, or native languages, they don’t recognize that it requires the same amount of small acquisition of knowledge and then practice, practice, practice. And so they feel like they can just read something and be like, I got it. And then they keep on making the same mistakes. So I’m here to say that you gotta find a small thing, practice it every day or every other day until it, when you go on autopilot, that’s the thing that comes out of your mouth. Because language is language and it takes a long time to acquire language and it can take a long time to change language, especially language that isn’t like, we acquire very easily food names. You can go to a restaurant where the cuisine is different from what you grew up with, eat something delicious and then from that point on, bam, you have that word, right? But people I talk to who would like to remove guys, hey guys, or you guys, that is, those are phrases that are stored differently in your brain, processed differently in your brain, come out at the slightest hint of wanting to do the function that they have. And so practice, grace and the ability to take feedback and correct mistakes. And I want to say, and we were talking about this a little bit with the pre-show, but I do other work.
I have a workshop, it’s called Rupture and Repair. It’s a part of an Ally Skill series. And the first workshop is how can you scientifically and accurately talk about the ways that bias is expressed at work? How do you have the language for it? Because a lot of people, if it’s not a slur, they don’t recognize that something’s been problematic. So that’s educating people about sort of basics of sociolinguistics or linguistic anthropology. The second one is somebody said or wrote something bad, now what do you do? And so what I’ve learned is that there’s this process from infancy called ‘rupture and repair’ where the original ruptures are someone being raised by a parent, when the parent leaves the room, that’s a rupture. And when they come back, it’s a repair. And so it strengthens the resilience of the child because they know, oh, my parent leaves, but then they come back. And what we find is that for any relationship, it’s a stronger relationship, when people have made a mistake, acknowledge the mistake and repair the mistake than if there’s been never any mistake made.
So for people who are worried that a mistake is going to harm you, I’m here to tell you that it actually will strengthen your relationships if you make a mistake and fix it. It’s actually a better way because it brings people to this new level of trust. They’re like, oh, I’m safe with this person. So I want everybody to feel…so many people come to me so anxious and nervous and I’m like, here are the things that I know people are worried about. Making mistakes is one of them, but making mistakes can actually help you. Isn’t that weird and ironic?
Beth
It’s wonderful, actually. It does make you feel better to walk around in the world, to make those mistakes, to think, okay, actually, this might work to strengthen my relationship with someone. But what if it doesn’t? I mean, I had someone the other week, actually, not so long ago, when they said the word, guys, I’m so happy you brought that up, [chuckles] because it is so common in my world. When they said the word, guys, I said, well, you know, that’s probably whatever I said, that’s probably not a great word to use in this instance. You know, we’re trying to get away from using that word. And they said something to the effect of, well, when I say guys, I mean, everyone, including men and women or whatever they said, right, it’s like their intention for this word is this. And so they really just kind of took my ball, I lobbed over at them, and they batted it away and didn’t, whatever, what’s my analogy, like didn’t take the pitch. [laughs] And it didn’t seem like it was going to integrate into their vocabulary from that point forward. So what do you do? Do I go back to them and kind of keep going? Or maybe I didn’t say it effectively in the first place, because not everybody is receptive, are they?
Suzanne
No. And so I just gave a talk the other day where I front-load with the two most common objections, right? I’m like, let’s get them out of the way right up front. I don’t say that, but I mean, they’re right at my deck right up front. And the first one is, well, I wouldn’t mind if someone said it to me. And so, and I don’t even get to intent versus impact. But very honestly, in this year of 2024, when we are recording, intent versus impact is a pretty commonly known thing, which is that your good intentions don’t matter if your impact is bad.
And so that’s why I talk about optimizing language or being strategic with language or empowering people to recognize when their language isn’t doing the work they think it is. And doing, I’m even calling it, I just wrote a newsletter this morning, a systems upgrade, right? We’re upgrading and updating all the time our apps, our operating system, our software, because there are components that are clunky, that are out of date, and they’re giving results that we don’t want. So we need to do an update. Well, guess what? Language is a system. And you are dragging along from the past outdated, clunky meanings that you’re putting in an intention, and guess what’s being spit out on the other end and landing on people? It’s not your good intentions. It’s harm. So for that person, I honestly would give up and just consider that a seed that you have planted. And then maybe enough of us out there in the world are doing the work to say, hey, good intentions aren’t enough, you have to put in the work to make sure your impact is also good. Let’s spread that burden among people so you can still maintain a relationship. And eventually, they’ll get enough pushback, especially from younger people who have very low tolerance.
I talked to parents of Gen Alpha, who they’re like, there’s a no tolerance policy. They just, their own homes, they feel very exhausted. I’m going to give one caveat to guys, and I need to research this more. Oh, maybe I should go on a field trip. I’m talking to more Canadians lately for whatever it is, just because of my work. And somebody made a strong case that there are Québécois people who are using ‘guy’ in a way that is genuinely gender neutral. I’ve got these semantic tasks where you can test to see. So one I use very commonly is I show a picture of somebody who’s very male-presenting with a long beard, and he’s wearing a suit and a tie. And then somebody next to him is very female-presenting, so wearing a necklace and a skirt and long flowy hair. And so the heuristic, the semantic test that I talk about is, if I’m standing across the street from these pictured people, and I say to my friend, who’s that guy at the table over there?My friend does not say, which guy do you mean, Suzanne? Do you mean the guy on the left with the beard and the suit? Or do you mean the guy on the right with the necklace and the long hair? Because we know that when I say that guy, I mean the male-presenting person, whatever their interior gender identity is, they look male. And so that’s what I’m talking about. But it turns out that people know people in Québéc who are not, that would pass the test. Like the way that they’re using guy, their friend would be like, and maybe maybe code switching between English and French, but their friend would be like, oh, which one?Right?
So I want to acknowledge that there is a chance that guy will become gender neutral. But at the present day, for most speakers of English, guy is reading as only masculine. And if you want to make sure that you are not alienating people who are sensitive to the word guy who feel very marginalized or left out either because they’re female or they’re non-binary or they’re transgender. And so they want to feel included. And the world that presents masculine words as if they represent everybody makes them feel excluded, excluded, excluded. There it is. Let me throw in one more example from another language. At my book launch, a friend of mine told me about a German friend of his who’s now bilingual. Well, Germans are so often bilingual in English, but she had come here to study. I think he knew her from college. And she said that the word ‘reader’ is masculine, grammatically masculine in German. And when a book addressed a reader in German, she never, ever felt–ever–in all of her years that it was addressing her. And she only felt acknowledged as a reader when an English book, which did not mark gender, addressed. So people think, oh, it’s just semantics or oh, everybody knows I mean everybody, but I’m here to tell you that there are people who feel very consistently alienated and excluded. So why not make a tweak so you don’t upset them?
Beth
Yeah. And that’s the impact piece you were saying. So as long as we all collectively keep working and saying things about the impact that our language has, we might not think. I actually don’t mind when people say, guys, and I’m included, it doesn’t really bother me. I guess I’m of a certain age, but for someone else, it really does. And so it’s that impact piece. You’re right. We don’t want to cause harm with that. It seems innocuous. It really isn’t, is it?
Suzanne
We are talking to people who probably aren’t in sales, but I have three sales stories that involve guys tanking sales or almost tanking sales until somebody is told to fix it and go back in the room because of who’s in the audience. I mean, sales that are $4 million and took six months to set up. And someone says ‘he’ and ‘guy’ and that deal is tanked because of who was in the audience and who was a decision maker. So the impact can be a real hit to your organization’s bottom line. Sometimes people think that inclusive language is just about feelings. And I’m like, let me delineate for you, organization with which I’m working, the ways that problematic language is causing you to hemorrhage money. And everything that you address is another way for you to not lose money.
Beth
Well, let’s think about another example. I mean, I was listening to or watching a video, I think it was, coming out from BCcampus here in BC, a year or so ago. And they’re the, they’re an organization that supports all post-secondary in British Columbia, and there was an Indigenous woman saying something like when there was no territorial acknowledgement from the instructor at the start of a class, uh, she left the class, never went back. And so sometimes we only get one chance, don’t we, to have, that was, that was adding in language, it wasn’t making a mistake, was it? It was forgetting or omitting to say something that it’s not about, it is about feelings, but it’s about belonging, who’s welcome there, who’s not, all sorts of things.
Beth
So, you know, she gave the person one chance and they didn’t take it and she left. And so that person, that faculty member doesn’t get that person in their class, doesn’t get to benefit from that person’s inclusion in their class because they omitted that one thing, which was very big.
Suzanne
I think that erasure is probably deep down the most painful violation of inclusive language that I find. Erasure. And I’ve done some work with California natives, and I don’t mean blonde people who surf. I mean people whose ancestors lived on the land where I’m sitting long before people of European descent came, right, so natives. I see so much erasure all the time, and I would talk to people when I was volunteering for what’s called language revitalization. How do you get people access to materials, help them read the alphabet that linguists use, help them put together a prayer in the language that they’re not as fluent in as they would like to be by using grammatical resources or recordings or whatever, right?
So I would do work, and what I heard again and again and again and again and again was how they were talked about as if they weren’t here anymore, as if they were all dead and long ago and far away. You know, and there’s a mall that I won’t go to down the street from me on something called Shell Mound Street, you know, and I think it’s the intersection of Shell Mound Street and Ohlone Way, so Ohlone is the umbrella term for a lot of bands for a nation from where I am in the Bay Area. And I’m like, this was built on an important site, you know. And people would tell me and also, PS, you don’t know very often by looking at somebody, we make a lot of judgments based on what’s called phenotype, right? So you can make a lot of judgments based on how somebody looks or also for gender orientation, right, for a gender identity. People will tell me who don’t look particularly First Nation or don’t look particularly native. So somebody doesn’t look at somebody and they think, oh, I have to be on good behaviour and remember to do that land acknowledgement, right?
I mean, I’ve had students who were blonde and blue eyed and fair skinned who came crying about the racist things their fellow students said, not knowing that they had a Black grandparent, right? You don’t know who somebody is. Somebody may look very femmy. I’ve got a colleague who wants to make a t-shirt called, femmes can be thems, right? So this person is very femmy, but is absolutely a non-binary person, right? And so is misgendered constantly. So if we don’t have a certain kind of awareness about who we’re erasing, there is something about human nature and human neurology that requires, for us to feel psychological safety, we have to feel that people perceive us and they’re okay with us. It used to be that you could kill people by ostracizing them, right? By erasing, by pushing people out from your tribe or your nation or your band or whatever your organization was, people…I mean, even solitary confinement is torture, right? Being erased from your context is torture. So congrats to that woman who leaves and allows herself to leave a painful situation that will only increase every time there’s no acknowledgement. Every time her history is erased, that just amplifies the pain. It doesn’t make it go away.
Beth
Yeah, and I wonder if they told the faculty member. You hope so, right? But she certainly told all sorts of other faculty members when she started doing professional development and that, you know, so a lot of people got the message, but did that person? I don’t know. It flashed through my brain when you were talking about you in the classroom, you know, not acknowledging Muslims that were there, that it really shouldn’t matter who we think is there or not. But in some ways we are making mistakes around that, aren’t we? That we think the person, for example, doesn’t look Indigenous, so they aren’t Indigenous. So we talk differently than we would if we thought the person was Indigenous? I don’t know. It’s a trap we fall into for sure. But is the ideal that we just actually use inclusive language in every situation, no matter who we’re talking to?
Suzanne
Absolutely. So this is why I’m talking about optimized language or well-designed language. You can think of it as a user interface design problem, right? If you’re designing a course, right, you’re designing, you have to think about every different avatar or persona for a person who might use, what’s that person’s starting point? What’s that person’s characteristics? How do I design this? Or universal design in terms of disability and accessibility, universal design is good design, right? The curb cut effect. Well, universal design for language is also good design. The more that you can create sort of an umbrella way of speaking that isn’t going to make somebody feel, for example, erased or ignored or disrespected and just stick to that umbrella way, you don’t have to have that heavy cognitive load all the time of making an assessment. And now I have to be on alert.
Beth
Yeah. And not make assumptions about who we think the learners are. I mean, this happens to us all the time in our work in learning design because we always talk about the potential learners who are coming into that online course and who are they. And, you know, so we do some of that, but we can’t just stereotype and say, well, they’re older adults. So I don’t know, I can’t even make up an example at this time, but we can say, well, who might typically come into the course, but we still have to use inclusive language all throughout the course. Because we really don’t know who’s going to be in there and what their situation is and all their intersectionalities and so on. So, as you said before, we’ve got the time to really pay attention and to work with our subject matter experts and to work with. I’ve got a team that I work with and an editor and, you know, we all have our eyes on that, but we’re constantly teaching our clients actually about what that looks like. And there’s stuff that they’re teaching us as well, for sure.
Suzanne
I have so many thoughts, but I mean, so here in the U.S., things that I see very commonly in adult education context are, for example, an assumption of monolingualism. So maybe it’s less in Canada, but there’s an assumption that everybody is a monolingual English speaker or that everybody is monolingual. An assumption of not having immigrant status. Let me tell you that this is not for design courses per se, but I was on a panel last year, a year or that. I don’t know what time is anymore, but it was at a time zone. So this panel, this conference was hybrid. So a lot of people were onsite in Colorado and a lot of people were coming in through the virtual platform that the conference was on, whatever it was called. And they didn’t adjust the times. They only gave the local time. And I have lived my life almost completely, except when I’ve lived abroad, on the two prominent time zones in the U.S. I’ve lived on East Coast time and I lived on West Coast time. And I had to do the math all the time. And I thought, oh my God, I forgot that if you live in Central time or Mountain time, almost nobody is ever just doing it for you. Like that cognitive load is always yours, something as small as time zone. But people not having their perspective incorporated or being erased, it’s like, you know, it’s like, oh, it’s your job to do that math. I mean, it can be the smallest things, but then when people are taken to account, they feel so excited, like the smallest. So I started earlier by saying that mistakes aren’t that bad. I will also say that what feels like a small shift to inclusive language can have enormously positive consequences. One thing that you say that makes people think, oh my goodness, that person actually thought about me in advance, even though there aren’t many people in my position, they thought about me and they made sure that I was included. I can’t even tell you how it’s enormous, how positive, how warmly they will feel towards you. And then you earn all kinds of grace for the inevitable mishap that will happen later.
Beth
Can we talk about the hidden meanings of words? And I think you used a term in your book called semantic frames, which I found very useful and I’m not going to be able to explain that, I want you to explain it. Tell me about the hidden meanings of words and what we have to recognize there.
Suzanne
So earlier I said that I present inclusive language as a set of behaviours, rather than a list of words. One reason is that human beings who haven’t had a lot of linguistics training, you have to have a lot of training to start to dig out the hidden meanings that are coming with words. It takes a lot of training, but I’m an expert in pattern finding. What I want is other people to be able to find patterns as well. So, a lot of people fall into the trap of, if it’s not a slur, it’s okay. It’s okay. And so this is why I help people understand the concept of semantic frames, which is, if you think about language, which we are, language is our interface to the world around us. It is how we learn to categorize the world, to give value to the world, to understand the world. And individual words, especially verbs, but nouns and adjectives–verbs, nouns and adjectives–in particular have a semantic frame that’s like a little scenario that helps you understand. It’s like a little play comes with the word that helps you understand what’s going on in the world. It’s your interpretation of the world. So the example that I use in my workshops a lot is the word purchase. Purchase, a very innocuous word, but it’s super rich. So what’s going on when somebody is purchasing, making a purchase, there’s a buyer gives money to a seller in a given location and gets goods in return. That’s the whole play. So a semantic frame is just figuring out what’s the tiny play that’s invoked when you use the word. So the thing with semantic frames is they help us find those some, not all, but some of those hidden meanings. When you start to play out a scenario, you start to understand in particular double standards or why a word that feels okay to you might not feel okay to somebody else.
A word that I use all the time to talk about this, and I use it for a different thing in the book, but it’s the word exotic. Exotic is a word that is about far away people, places, cultures, foods, things. But there are a lot of people in this world who are called exotic when they are at home or in a location where they belong. I am one of those people. Your listeners can’t hear [sic] me, but I am ambiguously ethnic. I’ve been ethnically misidentified since day one in the incubator, and so I am technically white until the 2030 census when I get to be Middle Eastern, North African. But in the meantime, people have misrecognized me as a person of colour since literally infancy, literally day one of birth. And so I am the kind of person, and I also am female and very femmy presenting. And so I am exactly right in the bullseye for who gets called exotic, right? And so for me, the semantic frame of exotic, it shouldn’t apply to me because people who have grown up 15 miles away but look white meet me and then will call me exotic. And I’m like, but your grandparents were immigrants and my grandparents were immigrants. You grew up in this town on Long Island. I grew up in that town on Long Island. To my mind, we are functionally equivalent, but because of my phenotype, because of my appearance, they keep on categorizing me as different. So that’s a good example.
I think another example of hidden meanings is, and I talk about this in the book, I dedicate a whole chapter to it, but a word that’s so fraught with danger is professional. So for anybody who is facilitating a course about workplace behaviours or anything that involves the word professional, I implore you to be very, very careful because it can be weaponized against people because the hidden meaning of professional in, I’m going to say North America. I’ve got enough Canadian data. Well, English speaking North America. I don’t have, I don’t have Mexican data. I want to be very precise, is that it’s people who, professionalism is defined according to white, male, middle class, and higher norms of behaviour, rather than more granular things like showing up to meetings on time, delivering work that doesn’t have mistakes because it’s been checked. There are ways that you can define being professional in a very granular and very precise way. But very often what I find when I go into client sites is that professional is being used to tell people who don’t match the norms. Maybe they speak in a different dialect that isn’t the standard American English or standard Canadian English. Maybe their hair isn’t straight. Maybe their hair isn’t a colour that people are born with.
There are all kinds of ways that things are told to people as being unprofessional when they’re not. It’s actually a bias and a cultural judgment. So the more that you can unpack the semantic frame of what professional actually means, what’s a real scenario where people are being professional and then compare that to the critical feedback, the more you can dig out the nuances of how somebody is being biased rather than giving actually useful and actionable feedback to somebody.
Beth
And I know you said you don’t really want to give people a list in some ways of kind of alternative words to use, but you do in the back of your book have that. So is it problematic to have that list of inclusive words in there? Or is it, yeah, I don’t want to put you on the spot there Suzanne, but it’s like, it’s very helpful for things like that. I don’t actually, I looked at professional and it’s not in the back of the book in that section, but there are other things in there, such as crazy or insane or those types of words where we just kind of sluff them off and go, oh yeah, that’s a crazy situation. But you’re giving people more precise language to use as alternatives. Can you say more about that list and kind of why you put it in there?
Suzanne
We’re calling it a list, but I’m going to call it like an inclusive thesaurus, right? So it’s an alphabetical order, a list of words that I have seen match my definition of problematic language in one way or another. And then I’m giving at the time of writing some potential alternatives, but I’m always saying, find your own. As long as they meet my criteria, as long as they don’t violate these principles, they’re okay. So I stand by the furthest left column, which is the list of problematic words. There is a chance that other words will not be as inclusive later because around sensitive populations, sensitive topics, we find language changing all the time. And when there’s a stigmatized group, words used to talk about that stigmatized group themselves become stigmatized and have to be replaced.
So I put that list in because my developmental editor said, who coaches people on books, who writes herself says, I would like just a reference list that I can pull out and use all the time. And I’m like, yeah, okay. So I checked with my other editors and they were like, yeah, that seems good. She said to me, this will change the book from being on a bookshelf to being in a desk drawer where people can pull it out because when they’re not really sure. I didn’t have room to explain in the back why each word violates a principle or more of inclusive language. And I’m like, bonus, do your own analysis, you know, help you really get a feel for it. But there are people who have started by reading the back and they get very angry with me. And they’re like, they go right to the list or even the people who hosted my book launch, you know, he was like, well, I started with the back of the book. I’m like, no. Right there I say, please don’t read this until you read the whole book. Like, don’t read it. He’s like, it’s so picky. There’s so many things. I’m like, no, this is exactly what I’m talking about. Like, don’t…it’s really meant to be a reference and a resource for people who are like, I get what makes problematic language problematic. And I just want a quick look up for when I just can’t find the word when you would turn to a thesaurus.
Like, for example, tone deaf. I just wrote my newsletter this morning about tone deaf. I had a reader, I have an advice column and a reader wrote to me and said, you know, I put tone deaf in this post about blah, blah, blah thing. And I got some feedback that it’s ableist language. But for me, tone deaf just means this. I don’t understand. And so I just this morning wrote this thing. And so I’m pretty sure I’ve got tone deaf in the back.
Beth
Yeah, you do. I saw it in there.
Suzanne
Yeah. And I’m like, here are other things you can say. And I went through a, I tried not to be too long, but this careful explanation that says the thing is that tone deaf says that if people have this neurological disorder, it equates some kind of hearing disability with bad behaviour. Right? But hearing disabilities and bad behaviour should not be linked because people with hearing disabilities can behave perfectly well. And people who do not have hearing impairment can behave very badly. So there’s no correlation between a physical disability and poor behaviour and poor judgment. So we want to cut that link. And so that’s why instead of saying tone deaf, whatever suggestion I had, there are other alternatives. But what I say to people is just find a thing that you feel better about. You know, like I’m caring about impact. Sometimes it’s going to be longer. With mental health words, it’s not as juicy. It’s not as strong. I always apologize to people. I’m like, I know crazy and insane and psycho. They’re juicy words. They really have an impact. I’m like, but part of the social contract is compromise. And there’s such negative impact with these mental health terms that we are using so loosely. There’s such negative impact that just making this small change to something a little less juicy, but not harmful, you know, it can be painful, but it’s just so much better overall for us as a culture.
Beth
Yeah. And it’s not about us, is it? It’s not our need to have a juicy word that should take precedence over someone’s thoughts and feelings about themselves, for example. Like it’s not as important, is it? For sure. I’ll say to you, I did not go right to the back of the book and look at the list. I read it from the beginning [chuckles] and I’m glad I did because it actually is a really wonderfully, I’m going to say easy read, but not, I hope you don’t take that, you know, badly. Talk about…it’s a compliment right?
Suzanne
It’s a compliment, I worked so hard.
Beth
It was so easy to read it and just compare it to my own experience, my own work, and the things that I did know about. And there’s lots of things that were, you know, a surprise or just thought about in a different way. So it was a great book to read, very accessible. I could just speak for myself. For me, it was accessible. I hope it is for all sorts of other folks as well, but I did start from the beginning. [laughs]
Suzanne
Thank you. I compare writing my book to painting a room. The prep work, to make sure everything was in place, was so much longer. I wrote the actual book in probably five months, and -was still working. It wasn’t five months of being in a cabin and scratching away with my quill. It was like work, work, work, and write the book a couple hours, a couple days a week. I had to think through, I literally had index cards with all the problems that my stakeholders had brought to me and all the problems. Then all the different kinds of readers that I expected to read the book. Here’s a tip for those of you who are considering writing a book. Non-fiction editors will ask you to describe your top three readers. Everybody wants to say, oh, my book is for everybody. I think the way to conceptualize it is not who could this book benefit, but who will take money out of their pocket and actually purchase the book? Who will be motivated to buy the book? I made a list, but then I made a longer list.
My book is presented as a business book, but secretly, and I tell this when I go to bookstores and talk to people who are staff, the book is very much for parents of newly out non-binary and transgender children to give to their boomer or older parents who were raised in such a different time that they are guaranteed to say things that are going to be hurtful to your little tender, vulnerable child in transition and coming out. I literally front-loaded everything that grandparents would need in the first three chapters or four chapters so people could say, you just have to read to chapter three. I have so many different on-ramps, but I also made it so that people would feel welcomed. The book itself is designed to be a model of inclusive language, and I had so many sensitivity readers, and I had so many people. I had a deaf reader who works on crip linguistics. I had transgender readers. I had so many people, and I said to them, do you feel okay with this text? It had to be a model. But part of the accessibility is I’m so deep in this for so many decades that I want to fire hose everything in my brain into somebody else’s brain because it’s benefited me so much. I just want other people to benefit. Then I’m like, oh, learning design, that’s not how it works. It has to be filled with poignant stories and good examples, and I have to share with my own mistakes and be like, I’m not lecturing here. Oh, I’m so perfect. I’m like, I’ve had a journey. Let me share my journey with you.
Two of my best compliments were one person by people who had to read my book, white men, white straight men who had to read my book, and one said to me, it’s like Pringles. I don’t eat Pringles, but I think he meant it was addictive that you just find yourself keep on reaching. He said, I was more than halfway done by the time I looked up. And usually the business books that he has to read are such a slog. And then the other person who reached out to me, who was forced to read it by his boss, is a conservative. He’s a self-described conservative, Christian white man. And he said, I thought I knew what this book was going to be, and then it wasn’t. And as I read, I realized that people in my life relate, like the stories that you told are stories that relate to my life too. And so I actually ended up really enjoying it and being surprised by how non-judgmental it was and how easy it was to read. So thank you so much for how much work went into making it accessible and readable.
Beth
Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, I wrote a book too, and I put a section in a very small section in one chapter. I mean, I wish I could have written a whole book about it too on inclusive facilitation. And so language was, again, a smaller section of that small section. And I was really scared, actually, because that evergreenness is not there for that section. I mean, it’s probably not there for the entire book, you know, 10 years from now, I’ll probably do another one. Five years now, who knows, right? But it was that inclusive section that I was the most worried about and did have to get feedback on. I mean, I got feedback on everything as you did as well, but it changes so quickly. And I was a little, you know, scared to write things down and put it out in print. And then it goes out there for a while. So yeah, it’s big.
Suzanne
I think people are very quick to feel judged and to feel like you’re blaming them. And there is definitely a blame or shame culture that happens, especially on the Internet where people don’t have to be in relationship with another person, right? So the anonymity and speed of the internet allows people to be very harsh and give feedback that’s not particularly useful, like do better or you should know better. My book and the work that I do elsewhere, you know, in other formats is designed to be very specific, like I’m starting from the presupposition that a person who’s picking up my book is a good person who wants to make sure that the language that they use lands as well on people as it can. And they’re like, okay, I’m willing to put in some work to make sure that I’m using this tool correctly. Like learning a new tool, you know, you gotta put in work. I don’t think there’s any point in shaming people who you think can change.
There are people, especially where I am, so where I’m in the States, I mean. So it’s an election year here in the States as we’re talking and there’s a lot of propaganda. There are very real Russian bots and disinformation and there are a lot of people who’ve been very polarized and who’ve been led to think that very hateful and harmful behaviour is their right. And so there’s that paradox of tolerance where if you tolerate intolerant people, if you tolerate bad behaviour, then you just get run over by them and they take over. So I do believe very much in maybe not shaming, but being very clear when somebody is being problematic and saying, this is unacceptable. Here’s why it’s unacceptable. And here are what the consequences are, right? I think that we should be doing that more. And in particular, American media is incredibly bad and engages in all kinds of distortions.
I’ve trained people in American media and then all around me still, I see all the time people doing exactly the things that I said to not do. So a Black, a Black target of a police shooting is described as if they’re the criminal. Then I see that in particular with extremely bad behaviour on the part of American politicians is reported on in in using what I call softening language that makes it seem as if it’s much more acceptable than it should be. So I do want to say that I’m not being all like hippy dippy, everybody should be, you know, we should accept everybody. No, there are absolutely firm lines and firm boundaries that we should have and say some behaviour is acceptable and some behaviour is unacceptable. But for a person who hasn’t been invited into this conversation yet, or has been reluctant for some way,
I find what is with all learning design, right? Don’t you want to make it tasty and appealing and say, I know some really cool stuff that’s super useful. Do you want to learn it? And so I feel that way about anything involving inclusion. Not everybody does that. And I think it can give, it can make people very anxious. I’ll conclude this mini non-rant, I don’t know what this is, like a rant adjacent thing by saying that people complain all the time about cancel culture. I don’t see permanent consequences for people who claim to have been canceled. I see them thriving and making money and having platforms. So there’s so many people who claim that they’ve been canceled and I’m like, but what does canceled mean to you? Because does it mean you’ve got briefly criticized in public? Because that’s all that I’m seeing.
Beth
Right. Yeah. No long-term consequences. I’m glad you mentioned media because I was thinking, oh, you know, as people that work with groups in classrooms or wherever we happen to be working with them as teachers and facilitators, we could think this is just verbal stuff that we have to watch out for. But no, the time you take that newspaper clipping, whether it’s electronic or paper and put it in front of a room and you don’t think intentionally about what that headline says and the language that’s softening or whatever it happens to be in there. I mean, there’s so much that touches those of us who facilitate, design and facilitate learning that we have to think about, isn’t it? And especially don’t even get me started on online courses. We already talked about how much work it is to write things down in a really inclusive way, universal design way. There’s a lot, isn’t it? So we just have to be ever conscious and ever aware of every aspect of our work in this way.
Suzanne
Well, that’s why always meant to be at the end of my book was an inclusion checklist template that people can use like a pilot safety checklist, right? So to go through before takeoff, before your comms take off, before your course takes off, before your workshop takes off, when it’s been written to run through the template or create a checklist specifically, because not everything will be relevant. So I have a large thing, but make sure, you know, do you have an intake form where people are self-identifying? You know, like people don’t think of intake forms, but intake forms can be places of great trauma for people who don’t see their honorific represented. So there isn’t like an Mx, which is pronounced mix or mux, depending, or there’s only…I mean, I filled out so many things. I just was in Belize and for my immigration form or my customs form, it only gave two genders, you know? There were so many things that I’m like, well, I’m not gonna correct the Belizian customs form, but I’m correcting forms all the time, you know? It’s just, there are so many places where people are erased. Oh, just for names, like the programming of what names people can enter.
So I was reading recently in Florida, we have a thing where if money is owed to you, at a certain point, the state makes, like you’ve left money behind, like I don’t even know where it comes from, but the state will make a list and then you can check and see what you’re owed. And the state of Florida, somebody did a screenshot where somebody with the last name, I wanna say Ng, but it might’ve been Li, was rejected because the people who had programmed assumed that all family names have three letters or more. And so it was rejected as an error. So anybody with a two letter last name, which is millions of East Asian people, I mean.
Beth
Oh, yeah, yeah. Ng would be a very common name probably.
Suzanne
Or Yi. I mean, there’s so many common names like that, and they were being denied access to their money that they were owed because of a programming decision. So I think of it as we’re sitting, I’m sort of overlooking my front yard, which is very small but very problematic. I just can’t figure out how to work it. And one problem is, no matter how much I weed, I feel like there are always more weeds, right? And I feel like it’s the same thing with text, like you have to go through and run check after check and weed out. It could be even just one small word that you’re like, uh -oh. I mean, people talk about pronouns and they think that people just mean she, he, and they. But I talk about we and you and anybody and everybody because there are so many ways that those people who aren’t on the alert for how pronouns can be erasing people or excluding people will use them willy-nilly, not thinking through who is and isn’t being included or left out when somebody says, ‘we all’ or ‘you all’. And it’s like, but is it everybody? Do we all? Do we all have that?
Beth
It makes me think that it’s just an argument for not working in isolation ever, right? Like even if we are a solopreneur and we’re doing facilitation work or whatever type of work we’re doing, we have to get people to work with us to help us see things we can’t see, right? Whether it’s an editor or a colleague or whoever, we’re better together.
Suzanne
A monoculture is inherently weak. In agriculture, in business. And diversity in plant and animal life, diversity in human experience and human identity groups is only, I mean, especially it’s so helpful when it comes to inclusive comms, because you’re not…and this is why I eavesdrop a lot on Internet conversations and why I’m loathe to remove myself from former Twitter, X/Twitter, because it’s been a place where I’m able to eavesdrop on conversations that alert me to things that I never would have known. And now suddenly, even though I’m by myself a lot of the time in my office, I still have access to things. But when it comes to stuff that is especially very public, I always have to run it by people because they always find something. And I’m literally a high-level expert and I’m still missing things.
Language is incredibly complex. It takes a very long time to learn how to speak a language grammatically, and it takes even longer, and speak includes, right, and not everybody speaks an oral language. So when I say speak, I include signed languages as well. So it takes a very long time to learn how to speak grammatically, and it takes even longer to speak appropriately. Think about how old children are before they stop being super inappropriate, right? Oh, God, then you get the teenage years, so it may be a really long time. But we’re always trying to figure out what the subtext is, what the context is, how to be appropriate. So you’re guaranteed, language is so complicated. The rules are so shifting and so complicated and so malleable and so different for other people. You need to lean on other people. It’s too hard. By the way, language is a communal project. It’s a communal project. We agree on what things mean, and then sometimes we disagree if they’re okay or not, and they shift over time. But it’s a communal project, which means if you want to make sure your language is in good shape, you have to reach out to community, and that community cannot be homogenous.
Beth
Well, I thank you for being part of my community. You didn’t even know you were part of it at first, and then I was able to reach out. And thank you for saying yes to coming on and talking about this with me. I’d love to follow up with you someday, too. I mean, there’s so much I didn’t get to ask you, Suzanne, but we’ll do it another time, another way. And I hope everyone goes and checks out your book as well.
Suzanne
Thank you so much. I agreed right away to be on your podcast because I knew we had so many points of intersection and we were thinking about so many of the same things. And I knew we’d have a fun conversation. And I hope your listeners enjoyed hearing it as much as I enjoyed speaking with you. I mean, how could they? But I really had a great time being here with you. Thank you so much.
Beth
Thanks again.
[Episode outro]
Beth
I really appreciated my conversation with Suzanne because she was just so real around discussing this topic with me. When a guest does that, when someone like Suzanne shares her mistakes, shares the things that have happened to her and how she’s learned in the topic that yes, she’s an expert in, it makes me want to share and also divulge some things that are hard for me, which I think is good for you to hear that none of us are perfect in our field or in things like inclusive language. And we all are working towards bettering ourselves in all sorts of different ways, and language is just one of them.
I loved what Suzanne said about systems upgrades, that we’re working on technology all the time that needs to be upgraded: our phones, our computers, basically every software that we work on has some sort of upgrade that happens to it once a year or multiple times year. And that’s just what we have to do as people as well, as she said. love that she made that parallel for us to draw our attention to that, that language is something that we need to keep upgrading in ourselves and potentially help the people around us to do the same. She talked about it being this shared responsibility. That if we do our part, hopefully other people are out there doing their part as well and collectively, we can all help each other get better around things like inclusive language such as what we discussed.
Again, Suzanne’s book is called The Inclusive Language Field Guide and I have a link in the show notes so that you can find that if you want to pick that up for yourself. Thanks again to Dr. Suzanne Wertheim for joining me on the show.
On the next episode of the podcast, it’s a solo one with me. It’s that time again and this one is going to be all about learning outcomes. Learning outcomes are something that I end up talking about almost every single day in my work as a learning designer and supporting my team around learning design and supporting our clients around learning design. I’m going to try to answer the top questions that you probably have around what learning outcomes are, why we would have them, what we do with them, how we write them effectively. It’s all about learning outcomes on the next episode. Join me then.
[Show outro]
Beth 46:21
Thank you for listening to Facilitating on Purpose. If you were inspired by something in this episode, please share it with a friend or a colleague to help them expand their facilitation practice too. To find the show notes, give me feedback, or submit ideas for future episodes visit facilitatingonpurpose.com. Special thanks to Mary Chan at Organized Sound Productions for producing this episode. Happy facilitating!
