Improve Your Communication By Improving Your Language
Language. Open book with language hand drawn doodles and lettering on white background. Education ... More vector illustration.
Flash forward to any digital dictionary today and you'll find that the preferred pronunciation is with the accent on the first syllable, while the accent on the second syllable has been relegated to merely acceptable—a vivid demonstration that language is dynamic and constantly evolving.
John McWhorter, an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Columbia University and the author of numerous bestselling books, as well as podcasts, blogs, and newsletters, described the continuous evolution of language in his New York Times column: 'we all know language inevitably changes; it's the way we got from Latin to French or from Beowulf to Tom Wolfe. But while that change is happening, we tend to see it as decay, sloth, maybe even a scourge.'
So to culminate June as Effective Communication Month, which is 'dedicated to highlighting the importance of good communication in our personal and professional lives,' this blog will focus on how you can improve your communication by eliminating one slothful word that has become overly popular in today's language and by adding a word that deserves to become more popular.
The slothful word in question is 'literally.' Sound familiar? I hear it used repeatedly as an intensifier, such as in, 'I literally ate the whole pizza.'The word is intended to mean in a literal sense rather than figurative, but the usage in previous sentence is to add emphasis. Merriam-Webster derides that usage, 'It is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis, but it often appears in contexts where no additional emphasis is necessary.'
I derided the word, too, in my prior Forbes post but it continues to be overused, if not abused, prompting Taiwo Sotikare to write on Medium, 'Language evolves, I get it. Words change meaning over time, slang infiltrates the mainstream, and sometimes, a little creative license is acceptable. But the rampant, egregious, and utterly baffling misuse of the word 'literally' has pushed me to the brink.' Steve Eighinger agrees in a post on Muddy River News, 'Do we really need to put an emphasis on what happened? I would argue that if it's a genuinely interesting event, there isn't a need for an extra word – especially that one. So, challenge yourself this week, month or forever not to use 'literally' anymore.'
Three other words have become pervasive in our business language: 'believe,' 'think,' and 'feel,' as in 'We believe/think/feel that our new product/service will make us the market leader.' This usage has proliferated because companies want to avoid making forward-looking statements. But those words express uncertainty and imply doubt—not a useful image when a presenter is trying to be persuasive.
This is not to say that you should start making forward-looking statements or forecasts in your presentations. Doing so is risky business in this day and age when corporate attorneys insist on avoiding class action suits. To avoid litigation and avoid using the weak words 'think,' 'believe,' and 'feel,' replace them with one word: 'confident.' One powerful word with two big benefits: you avoid being predictive and you sound far more assertive.
As William Shakespeare had Hamlet say, 'Suit the action to the words, the word to the action.'
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(The Tower of London has impressed--and terrified--people for nearly 1,000 years) Historians know that the Tudor structure replaced a chapel built in the 13th century that was destroyed in a fire in the 1510s. But that 13th-century chapel wasn't the first; it likely replaced an earlier chapel, and maybe even multiple previous chapels. 'During the course of the work, we've discovered potentially four high-status medieval buildings, likely the previous chapels that have all been built on top of each other,' says Hawkins. Though it was common knowledge that there have been burials at St. Peter ad Vincula stretching back centuries, the site had never been excavated until now, prompted by the need to add an elevator to the building, making the historic site more accessible. The dig was around 10 feet deep, encompassing about 650 square feet of spoil (the archeological term for the material that comes out of a dig), in a place where it's rare to excavate more than about 12 inches deep. Effectively, archeologists dug to the early 13th century. 'This is a very, very rare opportunity to get this information,' says Hawkins. The chapel foundation dating to the reign of Edward I who was King of England from 1239-1306. The Tower's chapel is unusual because, unlike other buildings in the fortress, it has always been used as a place of worship. Photograph courtesy of Historic Royal Palaces/Pre Construct Archaeology A pair of funerary incense pots that are likely to date from sometime between 1150 and 1250 and a post-1240 burial. The incense pots were a particularly significant find since grave goods were rare in the United Kingdom. Photograph courtesy of Historic Royal Palaces/Pre Construct Archaeology Archeologists, Hawkins says, 'found elements that relate to almost every aspect of human life,' from pieces of jewelry to shards of stained glass, and even exceptionally rare burial shroud fragments. Textiles are delicate and difficult to preserve even deliberately; typically, they only survive in anaerobic conditions. It appears they just got lucky in how the pieces lay in the clay: 'They had no business surviving where they did,' says Hawkins. Further examination will say more about the weave and make of the fabric, fleshing out our understanding of funerary practices in the period. Archeologists also found '22 articulated individuals and a significant quantity of charnel,' according to Hawkins, dating from the 13th century to the 16th century. Clues suggest many of these people were of high status: Many appear to have been buried in coffins rather than shrouds, which were more common, and it appears as though the lowest burials were originally inside an older version of the chapel, which also suggests social importance. 'Typically, if you're buried closer to the church, you're more important, and if you're buried inside the church, you're much, much more important, and if you're buried under the altar, you are the most important person,' Hawkins explains. Perhaps one of the most tantalizing finds was among those deepest and therefore oldest burials: a pair of funerary incense pots that are likely to date from sometime between 1150 and 1250. Such a find is exceptionally rare: 'Grave goods in Medieval England aren't really a thing,' says Hawkins. They simply weren't a common cultural practice at the time, and similar 'gravpottes' have only been identified in the country twice, in Oxford and in Scotland. The finding suggests that the individual may have come from Northern France or Denmark, where grave goods were a common practice. If the charcoal fragments in the incense pots are large enough, Historic Royal Palaces may be able to have an archaeobotanist, a specialist in ancient plant remains, reconstruct the incense. Scientific testing reveals what medieval life was like at the Tower Historical records are rich sources of information about medieval London, the Tower, and its residents, but archeology can fill important gaps. 'We know about trade into London, but that doesn't necessarily tell us what individual people were eating, or how diet might differ according to status,' says French. 'The human story locked in the bones is something that's been missing from the story of the Tower for a long time, because there's very little that's been recovered and there's very little that's been analyzed,' says Richard Madgwick, an archaeological scientist at Cardiff University and part of the team analyzing the remains. 'They give us pretty much an individual level of resolution in terms of where these people came from, what they were consuming, and also their health status in the past.' The project began with a test trench, dug in 2019 to evaluate the site. The team recovered the remains of two individuals, which were transferred to Cardiff University, where researchers used a combination of methods including macroscopic analysis of the bones to reveal information like age, sex, disease, and health, as well as isotope analysis, to learn more. 'Isotope analysis involves some complex science, but the principles behind it are very simple indeed,' said Madgwick: 'You are what you eat, you are where you eat, you are to some degree how you eat, as well.' Food and drink leave chemical signals in everything from human hair to teeth and bones. Different landscapes, too, have different chemical compositions; London, for example, has certain ranges of sulfur and strontium. That enables archeologists to build a picture of where exactly a medieval Londoner may have lived and what they ate. The Cardiff team found that one of the individuals excavated was a middle-aged female, who died sometime between 1480 and 1550. She was probably well-off since she was buried in a coffin and had a rich diet that included sugar, a rare and expensive ingredient. The chemical signals in her teeth indicate that she was not originally from London and had likely moved to at least two different places— potentially the Southwest Peninsula, Cornwall and Devon, or even Wales. The second individual was a younger man from around the same period and roughly apprenticeship age, possibly from the north but potentially somewhere closer to London, like Kent. Researchers found evidence of significant childhood stress; his diet wasn't as rich, and he was most likely buried in a shroud. Taken together, the findings suggest the diversity of life experiences at the Tower. (There's no sign either died by violence; most likely, they were parishioners.) Tantalizing clues about the Black Death The 2019 trial excavation scratched the surface. The team at Cardiff will now perform the same types of examinations on the remains from the most recent excavation. 'At the moment we've got these lovely two biographies,' says Madgwick. 'It hints at the dynamic movement of people and the dynamic life trajectories of the people who were buried in the Tower, but it's going to be really exciting to see whether we've picked two anomalies, or whether we see the broader range of lifeways that we see of those buried here.' One mystery that researchers hope to unravel is where the Tower workers came from. 'It's one of those big questions—is the Tower of London community a community or is the Tower of London community a kind of transient collection of people that come from here, there, and everywhere?' asks Hawkins. The composition of the Tower community makes this project particularly interesting because researchers are largely looking at what's essentially a middle-class community, according to Katie Faillace, a dental anthropologist and bioarchaeologist, who is part of the Cardiff team. Though several individuals were buried in coffins, most of 'the people buried here are not going to be the most elite. We're looking at this middle class that we don't often get archeologically.' Dentine analysis, too, will reveal information about things like what individuals were weaned on and when they were being weaned. The excavation included remains of younger children, reflecting the brutal infant mortality rate of the period and potentially offering an unusual glimpse of medieval family life in the Tower. One thing that further analysis will be able to tell us: whether some of those individuals died from the Black Death, which swept furiously through London beginning in 1348. 'We have a collection of seven burials from a mid-14th century context that appear rushed,' says Hawkins. If DNA testing does find traces of yersinia pestis bacteria, it would make these burials particularly interesting. That's because medieval Londoners quickly realized the plague dead needed special handling, and authorities created emergency burial grounds specifically to deal with the casualties, two of which were close to the Tower. The people buried at St. Peter ad Vincula instead of plague burial grounds are tantalizing to researchers because they might be some of the earliest victims of the Black Death. If that's the case, the discovery may provide a glimpse of what life during the early, likely confusing outbreak was like. The remains from the 2025 dig are being transferred to Cardiff University for further testing over the next few months. (The bodies will eventually be reinterred at St. Peter ad Vincula's crypt.) 'It's not a very big hole in the ground, really, is it?' says Madgwick. 'But the transformative potential not only to understand the people and the activities of the Tower but technology, trade, connectivity across England and perhaps beyond is just so exciting.'
