June 21, 2021
The most painful lessons learned in engineering leadership can be from when imprecise language has been used.
Linguistic filters
In May 2012, the author Robin Sloan noticed a trend on Twitter: people were increasingly posting tweets describing something that had just occurred, prefaced with the phrase ‘That moment when…’. Robin commented that this phrase helped cool down and add distance to their experience, and described the effect as ‘a linguistic Instagram filter’.
Over the years, I’ve built up my own vocabulary of linguistic filters: small turns of phrase that I find useful to say to quickly set up my teammate with a mindset to be receptive to what follows.
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June 21, 2021
