I looked at how Cambridge’s language changed across those weeks. This is explicitly about what the language shows, not what Cambridge intended, or what we might infer about motive. But when you put the statements in order, you can almost see the situation behind them changing too, plus the notable (to me) absence of any particular words.

More specifically, as the object of institutional risk changes, the language simultaneously reorganises around it. First the scrutiny is focused on Arday. Then on process. Next, increasingly on Cambridge itself and its appointment, standards and what it knew. And, after Arday’s death, the linguistic question maps onto proximity, and more importantly, belonging. Cambridge is an institution. Institutions run on reputation. When circumstances change, they have to respond and language is one of the places where you can see that response happening pretty much in real time.

What happens behind the words when the world is watching…

In a crisis like this, the statement we read is the tiny visible output of an enormous invisible thought process of what the wording must cover, potentially including: stakeholders, overlapping investigations or reviews, legal and duty-of-care considerations, media scrutiny, internal and external communications, holding lines, scenario planning, leadership and policy. Perhaps insurance liabilities etc., (you get the drift - the list is endless.)

Then the drafting starts. Every single word has to hold tight. Or at least it should do. A phrase can concede something, imply something, pre-empt cross-investigation or open an entirely new line of questioning, especially when scrutiny is across a global stage. And as the facts, risks and pressures behind the scenes change, the language has to move with them.

Here’s my analysis of what the language might reveal about the machinations of reputation management around the tragic death of Arday.

First: “victim”. When allegations about Arday first emerged, Cambridge described him as the “victim of a vile campaign”. Those are pretty strong, immovable words, with “victim” positioning Arday as someone being acted upon and vile making a moral judgement. Here, Cambridge isn't just describing events, it is taking a firm position. Normally holding statements might be sent out whilst an investigation takes place. (There was context, though. Liverpool John Moores University had investigated plagiarism allegations relating to Arday’s PhD. The issues identified were attributed to “honest and reasonable error”).

At this point, Cambridge's language has room to be unequivocal. But by 5 August, the language starts to change.

Cambridge announces an investigation following “new information” about Arday’s academic qualifications and honorary appointments. Suddenly we see the introduction of administrative language:

Fair process. Ongoing complaints. Academic misconduct. Research policy. Employment law. There is now an investigation to protect, employment law to observe, complaints to handle. The language becomes more constrained because the institutional situation has become more complicated. But Cambridge still ends with:

“We also fully recognise that there is a person at the centre of this situation, and we continue to provide support to him.”

A person at the centre. And so the language is doing two jobs at once: protecting process while retaining the ‘person’. Jesus College does something similar. It announces its own “process”, but asks that Arday and his family be treated with “compassion and respect”. Already, you can see the pressure changing the language: First comes: Victim. Next, process, but remember the person.

Then comes 12 August and an internal letter setting out Cambridge University’s approach to an investigation surrounding the appointment of Jason Arday.

The Vice-Chancellor and the language of process:

This time Cambridge speaks through Professor Deborah Prentice, its Vice-Chancellor.

By now, the glare has moved beyond Arday towards Cambridge itself, along with its appointments, processes and standards and we see the language expanding. The letter to stakeholders, from the Vice Chancellor, is (to my mind) unusually long and dense despite its job being to discuss the investigation.

It begins:

“Dear colleagues”.

The stated audience is internal and positions Prentice as a leader speaking laterally to fellow members of the community, but a letter in a controversy like this will travel, and it is reasonable to expect that every word may be used by the press. Other audiences can be expected too: staff, academics, governors, lawyers and people asking how the appointment happened and what Cambridge knew. This is partly an explanation for why every sentence is carrying so much weight.

Across just nine related word groups, I counted 26 instances of procedural language:

Appointment appears six times; work, four; variants of investigate, review and standards, three times each; process, approach and policy, twice each; findings, once. Here, the language of process underpins the entire letter. The institution now has multiple things to cover simultaneously: what happened, how appointments work, what will be investigated, who will investigate it, what will be reviewed and what Cambridge stands for more broadly.

It’s interesting to me here that as the institutional problem becomes denser, so does the language. Often institutions decide to strip back in order to avoid the weaponisation of their own words, but the cumulative effect of the repetitive procedural language here, at least for this reader, is almost confounding. Obviously institutions have to cite process. But here it is particularly heavy.

And it comes from the Vice-Chancellor because this is no longer simply scrutiny of Jason Arday. It is scrutiny of Cambridge, and Arday has become, in a strange and roundabout way, the figure through whom the institution itself is being watched. Cambridge is now responding through its own institutional figurehead.

Two days later, Jason Arday dies.

The Vice-Chancellor’s first statement following his death is just two sentences long.

“We are desperately saddened to hear this tragic news. Our heartfelt sympathies go to Jason Arday’s family and friends at this incredibly difficult time.”

After the density of 12 August, the compression is extraordinary. And again, think about what has changed behind the words. The circumstances are now devastatingly different. The legal, reputational and human sensitivities are different. The available linguistic territory suddenly appears very small, and the statement stays within narrow boundaries. We have sorrow, sympathy, family and friends.

But something is missing. There is no “our community”. No “our colleague”. No “member of the Cambridge community”. Nothing here that explicitly places Jason Arday inside Cambridge and community is such familiar and heavy-lifting institutional language after a death. We cannot know why those words weren't used. But linguistically, we can observe that they weren't. So let’s look again at the at the movement:

1. “Victim of a vile campaign.”

2. Then “a person at the centre”.

3. Next, the language of process.

4. And then two sentences of carefully contained condolence.

Now let’s look at Jesus College:

“Jason Arday was a Fellow of this College and the impact of the last few weeks continues to be felt deeply by our community.”

And so there it is:

Our community. (but interestingly here, Arday is not placed ‘within’ the community itself.)

Pretty soon after in this statement, Jesus starts drawing boundaries: Arday was recruited by the University. The College expected the University to check his credentials. He wasn't a College employee. He hadn't taught or worked on admissions. There were no student complaints. The College hadn't funded his legal actions.

Again, the language tells you something about the institutional pressure behind it. This statement needs to establish where responsibility sits and so it almost draws a map. Are the two macro and micro institutions aligned? Whatever operational coordination may have taken place, linguistically, their statements aren't really doing the same job: Cambridge as a whole is more protective with the process language partly acting as a shield whilst the investigations go on behind closed doors.

Jesus: Here are the boundaries of our part within it. All the language is doing reputational work in real time. Following Arday’s death, Jesus publishes another statement and so the language moves again:

“People across our community are experiencing shock and disbelief following the tragic and untimely death of Jason Arday.”

There it is again - Our community, (except still Jason Arday is not contained within that). The boundary-drawing disintegrates. Now the language is about Arday: his kindness, his family, the people who knew him. Then Cambridge moves too.

On 15 August, Prentice publishes another message, this time explicitly “to the Cambridge community”.

And that, for me, is the point. The language keeps moving because the situation behind the language keeps moving. You can almost see the institutional machinery through the words it produces; the pressure increases, the risks change, new information arrives, responsibility comes under scrutiny and the language expands, contracts, hardens, softens and as the object of institutional risk changes, the language reorganises around it.

Arday moves from victim, to person, to process whilst being (IMO) set apart from the ‘community,’ whilst institutional language has to stake its ground in proximity, responsibility and belonging. Here, one of its smallest words can do an enormous amount of work:

Our.

But the most devastating statement comes from outside the institutions. Arday’s family describes him not through appointment, investigation or process, but through relationship:

An “amazing father, partner, brother, uncle and son.”

After all those words about where Jason Arday did and didn't belong, suddenly it's simple. Cambridge had an appointment and a process to follow. Jesus had a Fellow. The investigations had a subject. The controversy had a figure at its centre.

His family had Jason.

Ours.

A brilliant post on this by - Letters From London.

And I’ll leave you with this video clip of Jason Arday.

This piece isn’t about Andy Burnham’s politics. It’s my own personal analysis on how Burnham’s language reveals clues about the man he might be.

Here’s the main thing I noticed about him: Throughout his interview the form of his language repeatedly moves alongside the emotional content of what he’s telling us.

Let’s dive in! Almost immediately, Burnham tells us something about himself.

“You’ve always got to prove yourself… I always carry that sense with me.”

He talks about imposter syndrome, waiting for “the tap on the shoulder”, and the question that has followed him through his political career:

“Am I good enough?” I noticed versions of one verb subsequently appearing at least eight times: try, tried, trying. It's a tiny word, but an interesting one because it leaves a fraction of uncertainty between intention and outcome. I'm trying. The possibility of failure remains inside the word. (Apt.) At one point Burnham says of his imposter syndrome:

“Even now, I still have that feeling…” And feeling is another thread running through his language. “It felt incredibly hard… It felt like a big failure.” Returning to Manchester “felt like being home”. And then: “Home means safety.”

He describes home as somewhere you “feel supported and secure”, where: “You don't have to worry about being somebody you're not. You can just be yourself again.” And here’s where another pattern emerges: If Manchester is home, Westminster is almost always linguistically distanced.

The world down there… The Westminster world… Someone else's world. Even now, occupying its highest office, Burnham says:

“All of you down here with the way you do things in your strange ways… I'm going to come in and carry a bit of Manchester back in here.”

You. Down here. Your strange ways. I'm going to come in. It's spatial language, but it tells us something. Burnham describes himself as an outsider to Westminster and his language also physically places him outside it. He says Westminster “makes you think a certain way, speak a certain way.” Manchester, meanwhile, is where: “I learnt there just to be myself,” and so the same pattern keeps appearing in different linguistic forms:

Home = safety = being himself.
Westminster = performance = being somebody else.

Which makes one small phrase about becoming Prime Minister particularly interesting: “I've relaxed into it.” This is someone who has spent some of the interview describing imposter syndrome, self-doubt and the need to prove himself. Yet what is arguably the biggest job of his life, he's relaxed! Perhaps because he isn't describing this as finally being accepted by Westminster (whatever that looks like). He's describing himself as entering it without having to become it.

And then there are his filler words.

You know. Sort of. I think. I don't know. There are repetitions and restarts, thoughts constructed as he talks. IMO, filler words are often interpreted far too crudely and related to confidence. Sometimes it can be almost the opposite. A person may be searching because the thought is complex, because several ideas are competing for language at once, or simply because we're hearing the cognitive processing that polished speech normally removes. What I found interesting was not just Burnham’s use of filler words but instead, where his fluency shifts and his cadence and language changes. (I also found this in an interview he did with Laura Kuenssberg - the filler words multiplied when he answered a question about Trump).

Here, though, when he's remembering, or working something through, you can hear the search. But, when he talks about social care:

“Shameful dereliction of duty…. Political cowardice of the worst kind….The most unfair way imaginable.”

The fillers disappear. His certainty isn't simply something he tells us. It changes the actual texture of his language. Perhaps because those phrases have been more commonly used in his politically associated parlance but it feels to me, more aligned to his emotional state. When the subject becomes deeply personal, the language moves again. Talking about his father, who has dementia, Burnham describes care-home staff sitting him in front of the television to watch his son enter Downing Street.

“They said momentarily… we thought he knew.” His speech becomes interrupted and less controlled. Obviously that doesn't need translating. As an aside, I noticed something physical here too. On two occasions Burnham crosses his arms while talking about deeply personal parts of himself: his Catholicism and his wife. I won’t pretend that crossed arms have some universal translation (in my opinion, the opposite). But the repetition, and the subjects around which it happens, caught my attention.

Because the important point isn't simply that Burnham becomes emotional. It's that the form of his language repeatedly moves with the emotional content of what he's telling us. The two are strikingly (and rarely for a politician) congruent.

It made me think about the King Charles speech to Congress that I analysed recently, because there the direction of travel was almost the reverse (obviously one is scripted, the other isn’t! But in politics even ‘unscripted’ interviews are often populated by answers, lines and formulations prepared in advance.)

On the surface, The King was talking about shared history, relationships and the future. Running underneath were different iterations of the same concepts with the use of 8 iterations of the same two words in just six minutes and forty seconds: Generations and Prosperity.

Generations. Generations to come. Generations yet unborn.

Shared prosperity. Joint prosperity. The individual wording changed, but the associations accumulated: continuity, legacy, history, shared future. There, language appears to have been engineered to construct a emotional effect. The feeling was (IMO) purposefully built into the architecture of a written speech by its speechwriters, operating beneath our conscious attention while we listened to the (brilliantly written) words on the surface.

With Burnham, it seems to run the other way. Rather than the language creating the emotion, the emotion appears to be shaping the language: His self-doubt sits inside the word try, his idea of belonging runs through iterations of feeling, home and safety. His outsider identity appears in the spatial language he uses for Westminster. His conviction changes his fluency and his emotion changes it again. The person and the language keep moving together.

Language doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. It’s often shaped by the nervous system of the conversation. Can the interviewer create enough safety for somebody to stop performing? (The answer here is clearly yes!) Which takes us back to Burnham's own words:

“Home means safety.” Home is where: “You don't have to worry about being somebody you're not.”

There's something beautifully circular about Burnham describing safety as the condition that allows him to be himself, while apparently being given enough conversational safety to speak like himself.

I usually look for the gap between language and intent. But here, what interested me was the lack of one.

Andy Burnham sounds remarkably like the person Andy Burnham tells us he is.

Much as I’d love to, I won’t go into the discussion here, but my Instagram algorithm has subsequently been flooded with footage of this fine young gentleman - reinforced, of course, by the fact I actually watch them all.

Last night I was scrolling through my feed and I happened upon a video of Jude endorsing Onside, a men’s grooming brand which looks great. ‘Made for Movement’ and with fab packaging, but more importantly (for me in any case, ) no aluminium, sulfates, parabens etc. As I was watching Jude endorse the brand (in a way that felt unscripted), his use of two words caught my attention.

Watch and see:

Talking about the products, he says: "I'll have something like these three with me all the time."

The interesting words here are ‘something like’. Language is rarely just about information. It's also about positioning, certainty and the subtle relationship between a speaker and what they're saying.

Had the sentence been: "I'll take these three away with me,” It would have sounded more specific and committed. Instead, "something ‘like’ these three" introduces a small amount of flexibility. Of course this doesn't prove Jude Bellingham doesn't use those products. Nor does it tell us anything about what actually went into his wash bag (more’s the pity). But what it does demonstrate is that tiny linguistic choices shape how authenticity feels often without the viewer consciously noticing them.

Most of us hedge, approximate and qualify our speech without thinking about it. Which of course isn’t to say there’s a single reason for it; habit, tiredness, uncertainty, a strategic desire to sound less absolute or any number of other factors. But those tiny choices become part of how a listener experiences what we are saying. Of course this all might have been a strategic choice of his - not to close off other brand deals, or perhaps exclusivity is more expensive for the company etc. etc. (thank you to the reader who pointed that out). Either way, the addition of those two words is a tell in itself.

And it’s often the smallest words often carry the biggest psychological weight and they're easy to overlook precisely because they're so ordinary.

Once you start listening for them, however, you hear them everywhere: in political speeches, corporate statements, celebrity interviews, apologies and everyday conversations. This analysis isn’t about whether Jude Bellingham really does use these products or not. It’s about what conscious and unconscious linguistic choices can reveal.

I'd love to know what you think. Would you have heard that sentence differently if he'd simply said, "I'll take these three away with me?" Did you notice his use of that particular word?

And now it’s been highlighted has it altered your perception of this advert?

I had, along with Dan Jones (now consumer ed at The Sun) worked on the piece for a while, collating information, tracking stuff etc. (That’ll be tracking – not hacking.) I loved it and that job taught me a lot. It taught me, in real time, where to look for stories; when to hone in on my senses when ‘something’ was off. Patience. The story will often reveal itself in unexpected places. An errant piece of data. The art of listening. The art of playing a part - Ryanair crew, for one.

I’d done a course at City University on investigative journalism (one of the lecturers was Russian investigative reporter, Anna Politkovskaya, who was subsequently murdered in 2006. I’ll never forget her dignified presence) and so I had already learned a shed load. But there is nothing quite like doing it in an actual newsroom.

Some investigations don’t start with a whistleblower but instead, something that doesn’t ‘fit’. A statistic. A date. A tiny inconsistency. It’s very often about recognising patterns; and quite often those patterns present in language.

Years later, I found myself working on a job in reputation management. It was for an elite London private school. The job was initially touted as ‘communications’ but it was, for my purposes in any case, a very specific ‘type’ of communication.

Anyway – that job also taught me an enormous amount. It taught me just how far language could go in making or breaking a place. I mean, we all know that consciously. But seeing the inner machinations of it all, was quite something. Very different to normal corporate businesses because of course their assets are …not just humans, but children.

Looking back I realise those two jobs weren’t as different as I’d thought. Investigative journalism taught me to follow clues. Communications taught me where institutions leave them…

These are all themes I’ve written about in my latest novel, Faculty of Liars. Scandal that lies underneath. But I look at it from a different perspective. The book is set in America’s most powerful (fictional) university and rather than being a campus novel it’s about the faculty – and the shadowy figures behind an elite organisation. It’s about what happens when we look behind the power, reputation and prestige. Which of course has led me to think a lot lately about language and how that’s used in everyday life. The words themselves aren’t usually the story. Rather they’re the signposts and they tell me where to start looking.

One very particular word has been at the forefront of my mind lately and it gave me so much fodder when writing my book. One word!

It’s a word that’s used constantly in public facing language: in government communications, corporate communications. In business. In elite establishments. In the NHS. In Royal communications.

It’s a word that is an immediate flag for me. Not in and of itself – but how it’s used, where it’s used and certainly in what context.

It’s a word that deflects responsibility from people to process. But for me that’s not the interesting thing about it. It’s the positioning of this particular word that tells me where to look deeper. Where the vulnerabilities might lie, where more scandal might be buried. In effect, where an organisation might be afraid that a deeper public shitshow could erupt. I’m not saying the word is hiding a scandal. But it’s placement and use posits questions. And once I tell you what it is you’ll see it everywhere and once we go deeper, there might be questions you never thought to ask.

Let’s dive in…

Read more

As I’d been amending and updating some previous slides, it struck me that these teens are all super-smart cookies: engaged, exacting and brilliant. Did they really give two merry shits about me begging for a job at More Magazine, a publication that they were too young to have heard of? (Position of the Fortnight, anyone?!) Well, it might be useful in parts, (the career trajectory). But could I offer them a different perspective?

In that room, all those teen eyes on me - or not; they were all dutifully closed at that point, I asked them to do one more thing...

‘Now,’ I said. ‘I want you to visualise an apple in your mind’s eye. A juicy red apple.’ This experiment is broadly used to discover whether someone has ‘aphantasia’. That is, the inability to generate images in your mind’s eye. Some can see a vague outline of an apple. Others can visualise a clearly-outlined bright red, piece of fruit. (Go for it – close your eyes now, what do you see?!)

Although the phenomenon had been described much earlier by Francis Galton, it wasn’t until Professor Adam Zeman and his colleagues gave it the name “aphantasia” in 2015 that many people, including me, discovered it had a name.

Here’s the actual slide I used.

(Don’t @ me about the graphic design of this…Can’t visualise, remember?)

I braved the room. ‘Who could see an apple in their mind’s eye?’ I queried. ‘Who could imagine that apple without it actually being there?’ Lots of raised hands. But then there were a few who were looking distinctly puzzled. Or rather surprised. Disbelief. Probably a similar look to when I discovered I couldn’t picture anything at all in my imagination. Zip. Blackness. Nada.

When I first discovered I was aphantasic, back in 2018, after reading an article in The Guardian, by Mia Tomova (titled: Experience, I can’t picture things in my mind), my entire world view turned upside down. That is, the words in my head had to do some massive recalibration in order to understand that ‘visualise this’ wasn’t metaphorical. I remember thinking: ‘What? This is an actual thing? People are actually ‘seeing’ their favourite place when they ‘visualise’?

It was quite a shock to discover I was part of only around 2% of other aphantasics in the world and that most people can conjure up images at their own behest.

At first glance, asking a room full of teenagers to visualise an apple has very little to do with storytelling. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised it had everything to do with it. Every story we write, read or hear is filtered through a mind unlike any other. Before I talked to them about storytelling, I wanted them to become curious about the minds doing the telling and those receiving it.

Since I discovered my aphantasia, it’s been a few subsequent years of processing just how much I would have benefited from understanding my own brain earlier and how differently my own story might have played out had I done so.

I spent years trying to fit into a system that, like many other systems, reward a certain type of cognitive style. Of course every system needs structure, but if your way of thinking doesn’t align with the way you’re being taught or assessed, it’s very easy to believe that the problem is you.

A lot of time has been spent mentally back-tracking; it explained so many things about my life: Why I’d always loved words so much. Why future planning and sequencing (packing, cooking, travel plans) feel oddly hard and why I can sense patterns pre-verbally. Even now, I think I know myself pretty well, and yet new things keep surfacing.

Most of us know of course, intellectually, that people experience the world differently. ‘Qualia’ (amazing word, eh?) are the irreducibly personal texture of experiences: the redness of ‘red’, the ‘feeling’ of happiness. But how often do we really interrogate what that means? Not just for other people, but for ourselves?

I still get dawning looks of amazement when people I speak to realise that they too, are aphantasic, or perhaps have no internal narrative, or sense things before they can see or feel them. Some people can ‘smell,’ or ‘taste’ things in their mind’s eye. Perhaps more accurately most people’s reaction is something along the lines of: ‘No. NO. WHAT THE HELL? HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS?’ (Because of course, we were never taught.)

We spend years being taught what to think, subliminally or otherwise. Far less time is spent helping us understand how we think. Understanding our own minds should be as fundamental as learning how to read. We’re all living the same human experience. We’re just not all living it in the same way. Something astonishing happened to me to shift my own perspective and my mind’s eye has, though, partially opened up.

With the teenagers in front of me, of course, my opening gambit wasn’t really about the apple. I wanted them all to interrogate something much bigger. How they experience life. Their wonderful minds, their perception, the stories they tell themselves, (or not?) their reticular activating systems and the magic within.

Do you think in words? In pictures? Is there a voice narrating your day? When an idea lands does it arrive as an image? A feeling? When you remember your childhood do you see it? Or do you just know it happened? How does all that affect how you live your life?

I’d absolutely love to know in the comments below.

It starts with an invite. One of my closest friends had been invited to a well-known place and invited my son (her godson) and me along.

Chatham House rules so I won’t go into it all.

Instead, I want to explore the use of one word that my friend said during the time we spent with her.

(The word by the way, unhoused. Used IMO instead of what is commonly referred to as homelessness.)

I’m not here to talk about the politics or semantics of the word itself – especially because the subject around it was nothing to do with either. What interested me was something else entirely.

*I did ask whether the use of it was a conscious choice. But then, reader, we got onto other extremely important topics before we could discuss further.

The word stood out to me in part because I hadn’t heard it before. Yet, what stayed with me afterwards, wasn’t anything to do with the actual word itself; rather that the intentional use of it served as a doorway into something much wider. It was the sense that the choice of it made me think about how language creates meaning and connection.

Let’s dive in.

Most of my writing here focuses on the places where language leaks information unintentionally; the moments where the subconscious is given space to reveal itself. In other words, the gap, or distance, between what is said, and what lies underneath. Sometimes there’s a genuine mismatch. We all know that gap – ie. an apology that sounds great but something doesn’t sit right. Sometimes it reveals more about our own perception than the speaker. Either way, we tend to notice it instinctively, even if at times we cannot verbalise it.

What fascinated me here though, was almost the opposite – the apparent absence of distance between that single word and the person using it, despite its conscious use.

We may (or may not!) think the best communication comes from surface-level eloquence, persuasion or rhetoric. Sometimes it does. And of course sometimes the gap between intent and language (here’s looking at you, passive aggression), creates a different form of magnetism in and of itself, because humans can be drawn to unresolved tension.

The brilliant Linguistically Yours! Substack taught me about John Langshaw Austin and the Three Speech Act:

The Locutionary Act: The act of producing a meaningful sentence.

The Illocutionary Act: What the speaker does in saying it.

The Perlocutionary Act: The effect produced on the listener.

It made me wonder whether the effect of language is shaped not only by the words themselves, but by the degree of alignment between those words and the intention behind them. As listeners, we infer intention; we are constantly constructing meaning from fragments: the words chosen, the way they are delivered, the person delivering them and how we perceive them.

Perhaps what we experience as alignment and good communication is simply a reduction in friction between what is meant by the speaker and what is understood by us as the listener – and subsequently, confidence in our own interpretation of what we are hearing.

Alignment in and of itself is morally neutral. A philanthropist can possess it. So can a fraudster. But when language and intention are congruent, the words carry themselves.

In essence, the words are animated by the speaker’s intention and when there’s no disconnect between intention and delivery, we feel the pure frequency of that intention.

Whether that feeling is experienced as trust, admiration, connection or something else depends on what accompanies it.

In this instance that congruence felt like it was paired with humanity, along with something indefinable, and so its resonance was especially powerful.

What do you think creates magnetism? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.

It’s an almost invisible layer woven into the speech, through language repetition, producing a collective emotional state that borders on the hypnotic.

Let’s dig in!

There are two, quite distinct words in the King’s speech that have each been repeated four times in different iterations throughout the address. Here’s what they are:

Generation/s

&

Prosperity.

When repetition is sophisticated enough, ie deliberate, through the use of semantic variation, (generations to come, generations yet unborn etc.,) we might not consciously register it as repetition at all.

What everyone hears: By jove - and ‘shared values’, ‘together’, ‘implied rebuke to Trumpery… and an eloquent plea’, etc., (Dimbleby).

But underneath the surface narrative and diplomatic signalling, another message is being rhythmically reinforced again and again to its global audience.

Words like generation/s and prosperity are associated with continuity, reassurance, legacy, stability, economic security, responsibility and - power! Our attachment to them, activates a specific feeling. And that’s what the variants of these words and phrases are really doing. They are emotional anchors and the strength of them lies in the careful repetition and surrounding phraseology.

Here are the exact quotes:

1. “We do not embark on these remarkable endeavours together out of sentiment. We do so because they build greater shared resilience for the future, so making our citizens safer for generations to come.”

2. “These are strong foundations on which to continue to build, for generations yet unborn.”

3. “The natural wonders of the United States of America are indeed a unique asset and generations of Americans have risen to this calling...”

(see how the use of the word here provokes feelings of empowerment, whilst also transferring responsibility.)

4. “Yet even as we celebrate the beauty that surrounds us, our generation must decide how to address the collapse of critical natural systems.”

Simultaneously, he’s anchoring in prosperity.

Much like the UK and US special relationship, don’t these words make a beautiful and wholly reassuring couple?

1. “Our common ideals were not only crucial for liberty and equality, they are also the foundation of our ‘shared’ prosperity.”

2. “To write the next chapter of our ‘joint’ prosperity.’

3. “This land’s extraordinary natural splendour on which so much of its prosperity has always depended.” (Handing over here of responsibility again - moral and financial).

4. “We ignore at our peril the fact that these natural systems, in other words, nature’s own economy provide the foundation for our prosperity and our national security.”

The brain interprets repeated concepts as truthful not because we have rationally analysed the claim but through the recurrence itself. The use of varying repetition here is also organic enough, so as not to trigger the neural equivalent of a red flag.

Instead, it creates familiarity, and familiarity creates perceived safety. This is why political speeches, royal addresses, advertising, religious ceremonies, and even hypnosis can rely on patterned linguistic recurrence. Cadence regulates emotion. And this speech does an extraordinary job of both prompting discussion, national pride and regulating our collective nervous system.

Even the sound design of the language feels purposeful. As well as the cognitive processing of language we absorb words somatically, through rhythm, repetition, tone, pacing and subliminal intent. At points, the King uses alliteration through soft repeated vowel sounds which create an almost soothing and resonant effect across apportioned sections of the speech:

‘From the depths of the Atlantic, to the disastrously melting ice caps of the Arctic...Armed Forces...Allies... North American... you get the gist.

The obvious intent here, (IMO) is reassurance, legacy and to set the UK apart in its own history and strength. But it was also about psychologically reinforcing the inherent wealth and power of our great nations, both to us and ‘outside’ spectators. Our collective (see? I’ve used that word twice. What could that mean?!) emotional state thus yields to the language and settles into coherence. Remove those specific words entirely, and the foundations of the speech imperceptibly start to fragment. The power of language!

Another interesting point: (At least I found it so)

“Our new partnerships in nuclear fusion and quantum computing, and in AI and drug discovery, holding the promise of saving countless lives.”

Holding the promise here keeps the outcome aspirational and allows the speech to project hope and progress, whilst simultaneously distancing - and without attaching itself to an accountable outcome.

On an end note, the King says:

‘Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice-President, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, America’s words carry weight and meaning.’

Et tu, Charlie. Et tu.

Thank you so much to the person who wrote in suggesting for a decode of this.

And hats off to the speechwriters here and, of course, the King himself.

Language - always a tell. I’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Until next week, folks!

First, watch the 18 second clip and then let’s dig in!

Brand opens up the conversation with this quote: (Not shown in this vid)

‘In Europe and the United Kingdom, where I’m from, the age of consent is sixteen. And I did sleep with a sixteen-year old, right, when I was thirty.’

Before anything else is said, his language validates himself within the law. And the addition of the three tiny words: ‘where I’m from’ anchors the statement to his ‘home’ and to a wider context, rather than to himself.

Now onto the video:

The quote before where the vid starts is this:

‘Consensual sex, actually, with a variety of people where there is a strong power differential, which there is when you’re a famous man who has the ability to attract women which I had at that time, I think involves exploitation.’

He then goes onto say:

‘It is exploitative’.

He is referencing his behaviour here as an abstract concept and his use of the word ‘it’ in his repetition statement does the job of distancing himself entirely from the act itself.

Now, onto the next bit:

‘I recognise that my sexual conduct in the past was selfish.’

I ‘recognise’. This, to me, is the most revealing part. His words signal accountability, reflection and growth. But what his language has actually done, is to position himself as thus, without him actually having to do anything about it. Intellectualisation - no embodiment.

And lastly:

‘I didn’t apply enough consideration.’

Apply is a mechanical word. It belongs to process and to systems. Again, the language works and it manages the tone. But it also creates distance from the human reality of what’s being described.

Despite his actions, each phrase sounds reasonable but they create a pattern of framing first, abstraction over ownership and recognition as resolution. It sounds like he’s taking responsibility for his behaviour, but structurally, his words remove him from fully sitting in it.

Language always reveals more than it intends to. And once you start listening for it, you can’t unhear it.

This isn’t just about Russell Brand. It’s about something broader: The gap between what’s said and what’s actually going on underneath it. That gap is everywhere. In people, in power and in the stories we’re told and the ones we tell ourselves.

Comment your thoughts below - I’d love to hear what you got from this clip…

The word I’m revealing today is in a press statement released by one of the UK’s most elite schools after a former member of their staff was charged with assault on a student.

This particular word exposes something about the institution whilst also placing its signatory in a precisely calibrated psychological positioning. This isn’t a claim about what did or didn’t happen and anyone’s intention; it’s an analysis of what the language suggests.

Before I get stuck in, have a guess at what it is. Here’s the statement:

For those of you new here, hello I’m Bex. I’m an author and I decode words and analyse the psychology of language.

Back to the school…

The UK’s most elite private schools are those with generational-ties and legacies that families want to protect at all costs. In many cases, the children being educated in these institutions are future figureheads of enormous family businesses both in the UK and overseas so when something goes wrong, everyone’s got reputational skin in the game.

In this instance with an assault on a student, everything comes into play: safeguarding, legal, global reputation and stakeholder trust. These statements are meant to be internally aligned but here, this one word, in this specific context has, IMO, done more subliminal damage than an overt disaster which can work in a business’s favour by consolidating their reputation in a very specific way. (Although obvs not in awful cases like these).

The language used here has to cover not just the incident in and of itself, but everything adjacent to it that a journalist might join together to create a bigger picture.

Right let’s dive in! Here’s the release again:

And here’s the word:

“Transformed.”

Transformed.

I don’t believe this word was used as pre-emptive insulation for anything else historical that might come out, (that’s impossible really - there’ll always be more in institutions) but interestingly the Head, whose name was attached to the statement, was appointed after this event occurred, and so this word ‘transformed’, simultaneously (unintentionally or not) distances himself quite heavily from the ‘before,’ whilst implicitly crediting his own tenure with the change. Quite a feat!

That word might be protecting the individual. But it has also exposed the system. It’s created a timeline and highlighted the past. And that ‘past’ is only just over ten years ago.

Yes, safeguarding processes across schools has changed (or even better, evolved) with the involvement of external agencies - eg., *the Local Authority Designated Officer in 2019, but ten years ago, safeguarding was already an absolute baseline expectation in all schools - let alone high profile ones. And in this case, it’s referring to safeguarding ‘culture’ which is very different.

Many of the parents currently paying fees had children in the system then (at some UK schools a child is registered for admissions on the day of birth). So if the safeguarding culture has been transformed…what does that specific word invite us to assume about the past?

And this is why language matters at a forensic level. Whilst a parent or guardian - or any stakeholder in fact - may not consciously acknowledge the wording and think: “hang about, what was happening ten years ago that a culture has changed so significantly,” the question still lands unconsciously. It’s how reputational unease builds, through small linguistic tells.

Language - it’s always a giveaway.

For more linguistic decoding please hit the subscribe button below- I’ve got some exciting things coming up for you all.

Until next time, folks!

*The Officer LADO is responsible for managing allegations against adults who work with children. This involves working with police, children’s social care. employers and other involved professionals. The LADO does not conduct investigations directly, but rather oversees and directs them to ensure thoroughness, timeliness and fairness.” - The National Lado Network.

It’s a word that appears in an interview between Louis Theroux and a prominent figure in the manosphere, Harrison James Patrick Sullivan, (AKA ‘HSTikkyTokky’). The conversation centres on the absence of Sullivan’s father, rugby player Victor Ubogu.

I’ve put the 10 second video clip below. Have a watch and see if you can spot the word that’s the linguistic tell. But firstly, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, the manosphere is a loose ecosystem of influencers, podcasters and online communities built around a particular narrative about masculinity.

The tone and language built around the ‘manosphere’, is declarative and often unapologetically dominant. But certainty in language is often more fragile than it appears.

Have a look:

SULLIVAN: ‘If there is any trauma there, (regarding the absence of his father - ed.) what I will say, is it’s subconscious. It’s not something I’m aware of.’

THEROUX: ‘Really?’

SULLIVAN: ‘Yeah. Definitely. Definitely.’

It’s not a controversial word, unlike lots of the other language in the doc. It’s a word used in the every day. Once I delve into it, you’ll see more of the emotional architecture beneath the conversation.

The one word?

DEFINITELY. And the linguistic giveaway is in Sullivan’s use of repetition.

A word most people would never think twice about.

Definitely.

And then, repeated:

Definitely.

In linguistics, repetition like this is a giveaway. When someone repeats certainty, the language is often doing emotional work. Sullivan isn’t just answering a question, he’s reinforcing his own statement.

The repetition reveals the disconnect between what he’s saying, and what he’s trying to protect. The use of that single word exposes that disconnect beautifully. The ego edits sentences constantly, choosing words that protect identity and, in situations like these, keep uncomfortable emotions from surfacing. But the edits are rarely perfect. Language is fascinating when it circles the unresolved and the reveal is often in something as simple as ten letters.

This is part of The Word Paradox (Words With Bex): the way language reveals the very thing it’s trying to conceal.

None of this excuses what that pain sometimes becomes (in this case, the manosphere) and all the anger, ideology, and performances of dominance that circulate within it. But it does remind us of something much more human.

And once you start listening for these unintentional linguistic tells, you hear them everywhere: in interviews, in apologies, in political speeches, in everyday conversation.

Language: it’s always a giveaway. I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments below.

Follow for more word decodes.

Until next time, folks.

“It’s really translating a frequency and so I think the resonance of the words really matters”

A friend of mine (who has requested anonymity), is a developing medium. I had a session with her very early on in her training and whatever one’s personal view of mediumship- something happened during that reading that I still find difficult to get my head around - and it centred on one single word.

I won’t repeat it because the message was private. But it was a random word; you wouldn’t throw it around too much in modern day parlance. In fact I probably hadn’t heard it since I was very small. As soon as she said it, I knew exactly what - and who - it referred to. The accuracy was pretty mind-blowing, along with the rest of the reading. Part of what fascinated me was the form the initial message took. Just one word. Which raised lots of (also mind-blowing) questions for me.

If communication arrives like that, then what’s happening in the mind of the person receiving it? Does the message arrive already as language? Or does something else arrive first: an image, a feeling, a knowing, and the brain rapidly translates it into the closest available word or interpretation?

Of course, I’m very aware that every medium describes the experience differently and receives the communication in their own way, through the different “clairs”. For those that might not know all of these: Clairvoyance - seeing images or symbolic scenes in their mind; clairaudience - hearing words or sounds internally; clairsentience - feeling emotions or physical sensations that don’t seem to originate from themselves, and claircognizance, a sudden, fully-formed knowing.

I was intrigued enough, though, to hear even one person’s experience of mediumship and how their communication is received.

And of course the linguistic element of that ‘one word’ stayed with me. Because if the communication didn’t originate in language (consciousness?), something in the mind had to select that word from thousands (c. 470,000 in the Eng. Lang.) of possible alternatives.

I ask for elaboration:

1. Can you tell us a bit about how the process works? How does it begin for you? What signals that someone is communicating through you?

There’s a moment – a sort of cue I get – when I feel a communicator’s presence and they’ll impress my mind with an image, a short film reel, a song or a smell. They might give me three or four pieces of information to start with. It’s a magical moment and it’s also very, very subtle. There’s a sort of knowing and a trust that they’re there, that develops over time.

2. Do you receive literal words, or is it something more abstract? Impressions, images, emotions that you then translate into language?

I sometimes receive song lyrics, which can really tell the story of the communicator. It might be a line from their favourite song, or music that was played at their wedding, or lyrics that really capture their essence or life story. At the moment I tend to get 80s hits in readings. I might also receive names (theirs or someone close to them), their last words, or a particular turn of phrase. But mostly the communicator will impress my mind with images, film reels, smells, sounds – occasionally words – and it’s my ‘job’ to feel into them and tell the story of who they were, and why they’ve come forward to communicate. Clairaudience (perception of sounds or hearing) is usually the last clair that mediums develop.

3. Is this how you normally ‘think’? Or totally different.

All mediumship moves through the mind but my teacher would say that mediumship is really the language of feeling. Another teacher says: ‘If you’re thinking you’re not linking’ (as in connecting with the spirit communicator). A medium who is struggling with a link might often say: ‘Oh I’m getting in my head’ and then they risk dropping the link or colouring a reading with their own assumptions or projections. The medium’s ‘job’ is really about becoming the clearest channel possible and surrendering to the communicator, a bit like the way a musician loses themselves in their playing of an instrument. It’s like a very deep listening (without in any way trying or interpreting) and feeling with all your awareness into what someone on the other side has come forward to say. Since developing my mediumship I suppose I am less prone to overthinking and better at feeling my way through life.

4. And when you turn what you receive into words, how much of that language feels like yours and how much feels like it belongs to the person communicating with you?

I suppose it’s a mix – the communicator is impressing my mind so it’s their story, details from their life and message filtered through my words.

Sometimes they might drop in a turn of phrase unique to them or if they were a real wordsmith they might communicate that in different ways. People who were good communicators here – in whatever form that might have taken – tend to be good communicators from the other side. If they were really chatty and vibrant, you will feel it. But if you got a communicator with really wild and colourful language you wouldn’t necessarily give that to a sitter in a public demonstration. I would always aim to be sensitive and respectful with my choice of words – while hoping to capture the spirit of the communicator – and hope that messages would be uplifting and healing.

5. I know you’ve communicated with your own loved ones before. Does the communication carry their recognisable voice? Their humour, rhythm or the phrases they would have used when they were alive?

I have a very good friend on the other side who’s a serious character and had a very singular turn of phrase. He will sometimes drop in pithy one liners but the way I communicate with him – or anyone else I knew – is different to the way I talk to other spirit communicators. I can send out a thought to my friends and family and get a reply and I will feel them around me very strongly, often steering and guiding, but I think there are reasons I can’t talk to them the way I can to others. Some mediumship teachers also say that mediumship is meant to be a service to other people rather than ourselves, and there’s a risk that mediums wouldn’t process their own grief if they were always trying to connect with their own people on the other side.

6. If images or impressions arrive first how do you decide which words to use? Do the words feel chosen by you? Or do they already arrive shaped in the language that person might have used?

My clairaudience is not that developed so I usually have a sensing/feeling mixed in with an image to start with. We are encouraged to use confident language to start out with: “I’m aware of a father who’s showing me that …..” and then you say translate the image. It’s really translating a frequency and so I think the resonance of the words really matters: that they capture the essence of the communicator, their story and some really “evidential” details about them. Communicators apparently rehearse what they want to say before they step forward.

7. If language is the surface where identity becomes visible, what do experiences like this suggest about who we really are?

Thank you so much for your insight! - And - to my readers I’d absolutely love to know your thoughts on this -about language in all its forms; have you ever had signs, coincidences, words, feelings, sounds or images that you’ve absolutely known are from loved ones from the other side?

See you next week, folks.

Hannah’s mother has given me permission to share Hannah’s words.

This piece has been edited, following correspondence received after publication. Some contextual sections from the original version have been removed.

A poem of Hannah’s. And within them, are six life-changing words. These words hold what I believe to be the paradox of life – that we need stories to live by and yet – in order to be truly free, we need to release them. These words of Hannah’s hold this paradox - and they are amongst the most powerful words I have ever read.

I repeat these words over and over. I repeat them as I hear the news that Hannah’s body has been found. I repeat them as the news is imparted to her friends. I repeat them every day. Within them, I sense a still point; a coherence. And as the days forge ahead, I start to repeat them as a way of listening inwards. Outside, a narrative starts to form around the yacht disaster. But within me, with Hannah’s words, the narrative I’d been clinging onto for a lifetime, starts to dissolve. In those six words, something about what it means to be human suddenly becomes clear to me.

Today, on Hannah’s birthday and with her mother’s permission, I share these words with you. If you are feeling untethered, or your own narrative no longer holds you, it may be that the words you need are not the ones that define you, but the ones that reveal the essence of who you truly are.

I hope these words carry you as they have carried me - when life feels too uncertain. When life feels too certain. A bridge back to yourself when the stories fall away, and only love remains.

“The heart is a heaven itself.”

Hannah Lynch (2006–2024).

This is not a critique of Harrow as a school, but a decoding of Harrow as a system - and my personal reading of it.

This case study uses the institution’s own language to understand how it operates and, by extension, how elite institutions more broadly organise, protect, and reproduce themselves.

In globally recognisable establishments such as Harrow, ed…

Read more

Hi, I’m Bex, author, journalist, and communications strategist.

Today’s Substack looks at a single word Deepak Chopra used and what it reveals about his strategic and psychological positioning.

This week, I read a Facebook post, by Lissa Rankin, who shared an email she received - a message from Chopra himself, sent to his membership community. Lissa’s post is entitled: Come On, Deepak, You Can Do Better Than The Avoidant Email You Just Sent Out.

There’s the use of one word in particular within Chopra’s message, that struck me. But first…

For those unfamiliar with Chopra, he’s a bestselling author, public speaker, and prominent figure in modern spirituality and alternative medicine, with a global audience in the millions.

Recently, Chopra appeared in the Epstein files, after communications from 2016-2019, between himself and Jeffrey Epstein were published.

Chopra has since issued a specific statement on X to his 2.7m followers, addressing his inclusion in the files (published 4th Feb 2026). It says pretty much what you’d expect:

“I am deeply saddened by the suffering of the victims in this case… My focus remains on supporting accountability, prevention, and efforts that protect and support survivors.”

“Supporting” accountability is interesting in itself, but it’s not the word I’m focusing on here.

And to be clear, I’m here to analyse the psychology of language, not to infer guilt or evidence of misconduct. (Links to video of Chopra being approached for comment.)

First off, there’s a dissonance between the overt, public-facing language he uses in his ‘Epstein’ X statement and the softer messaging used in his membership email, which appears to be calibrated with a wider strategy in mind.

Let’s take a closer look…

Excerpt from Chopra’s Membership email:

“Dear Friends,

I want to take a moment to speak to you directly. I know this has been a difficult and unsettling time for some in our community.

As long as I’m able to, it remains my intention to continue sharing practices and perspectives on Body, Mind, and Spirit, and to be present with this community as we move through this moment together.

This is a process that continues to support me personally, and it is my hope that what is meaningful for me may also be supportive for you.

A Reflection: Integrating the Shadow

In times of change, many of us find ourselves reflecting more deeply on our inner world and emotional patterns. One of the most important aspects of personal growth is learning to recognize and integrate the parts of ourselves we may have previously overlooked or pushed aside.

In this short reflection, I explore the idea of the “shadow” in a universal and practical way, and how bringing awareness to these hidden aspects of ourselves can support greater clarity, wholeness, and healing” - DEEPAK CHOPRA.

The email itself from Chopra offers no reference to what this ‘moment’ is and I have no titular context from Lissa’s Facebook post.

In any case- his ‘shadow’ talk is a giveaway, and the lack of specificity in itself within the email, is part of what makes its language so interesting.

Most of the email reads as familiar spiritual wording. But all of it is organised around one word: a single, linguistic sleight of hand.

And that word?

Together.

“As we move through this moment together.” There’s no separation between speaker and audience. Instead, Chopra subtly collapses the boundary between his personal process and the emotional experience of his community.

This word becomes the centrepiece of his messaging. It reassures through tone, familiarity, and emotional inclusion but it also performs a deeper, subliminal function. It distributes psychological weight outward, integrating his individual accountability into a collective, emotional field. In that sense, the specific subject matter of the email itself is almost redundant; that single word - together - is still doing the strategic work of diffusing responsibility in relation to Chopra’s wider reputation.

Strategic language choices are often shaped by internal pressure; and what reads as manoeuvre on the surface can also function as self-regulation underneath. Here, together stabilises Chopra’s uncertainty. It softens threat and reduces isolation, not just for the audience, but for Chopra himself.

And it’s often this - the unnecessary word and it’s very presence, that offers the clearest insight into someone’s state of mind.

I’d love to know your thoughts and how you felt reading Chopra’s comms.

Words - they’re always a giveaway!

For more insights into the psychology of language, subscribe below.

Until next week, folks.

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Today I’m revealing how the single word, used by Buckingham Palace exposes its entire PR strategy on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Institutional press statements, especially those issued by Buckingham Palace, are ruthlessly engineered. They are drafted, redrafted, and interrogated, with every word surviving layers of scrutiny: legal, reputational, political, and retrospective defensibility. Nothing lands on the page by accident.

In a statement issued on behalf of King Charles last October, there is one word that gives the Palace’s game away. It’s delivered so seamlessly it’s barely noticeable. What’s interesting here is the timing of the use of this word, which calls into question what exactly the Palace knew, and when.

Let me show you the statement, then I’ll decode the word…

***

A statement from Buckingham Palace (Published on the 30^th October 2025):

His Majesty has today initiated a formal process to remove the style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew.

Prince Andrew will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

His lease on Royal Lodge has, to date, provided him with legal protection to continue in residence.

Formal notice has now been served to surrender the lease and he will move to alternative private accommodation.

These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him.

Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.

***

Can you spot it?

On the surface, this statement reads as formal, neutral, and almost administrative. It’s factual scaffolding, and overall, the language is pretty procedural. Except for one, single outlier.

That word is…

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“CONTINUES”

Let’s strip the sentence back to see it without the word ‘continues’:

“These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he (Andrew) denies the allegations against him.”

Versus the ACTUAL statement:

“These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he (Andrew) continues to deny the allegations against him.”

One extra word. An entirely different posture. On its own, the word ‘continues’ sounds soft. It’s almost benign and supportive. Certainly less abrasive than alternatives like ‘strongly’ and ‘vigorously’, again, typical words used by the Palace within this type of context. But this softness is precisely why this word has been used. Because ‘continues’ frames a denial, rather than reporting one.

It does the very subliminal job of recasting Andrew’s position as ongoing, unresolved, and, most importantly in this case, his position alone. It keeps the controversy alive without restating it, and it prepares the public, very subtly, for more to come. Most importantly, it performs a clean institutional manoeuvre: detachment.

“Andrew denies the allegations” is definitive and absorbs risk whilst standing with the subject (in this case, Andrew). “Andrew continues to deny the allegations” does something else entirely. Here, the institution steps back, and the Palace is no longer advocating for him. It’s recording persistence (and that’s one word that is particularly apt for Andrew, isn’t it?) and simultaneously archives a position at arm’s length.

Its neutrality is also very effective; there’s no legal implication, and it shifts responsibility outward. The Palace’s strategy here was never defence, it was separation.

Power doesn’t always give an outright denial; it moves alongside events, and that’s precisely how it survives scandal.

Words – they’re always a giveaway!

For more insight into the psychology of language, hit subscribe below.

Until next week, folks!

Today I’m decoding one word that exposes the deplorable spin used by Peter Mandelson in an attempt to sway public narrative over his behaviour.

This one word appears in an interview in The Times, given by Mandelson to Katy Balls.

It’s a word that is totally anomalous in both his lexicon and the interview itself. And it’s one word that is used to do something very specific. It’s a word upon which the entire interview hinges – the rest is a load of fluff and obfuscation, designed to keep us reading whilst he tries to sway the narrative so that his actions seem more palatable.

Some context:

Below is an email chain from the Epstein files that follows a financial transaction that was made from Epstein, to Mandelson’s partner, Reinaldo. Monies were given by Epstein, to Reinaldo, to fund an osteopathy course.

Let’s take a look at part of this email. Firstly, Epstein says he will wire the money for Reinaldo’s osteopathy course ‘immediately.’

There is a subsequent request from Mandelson to Epstein that this transaction must be couched as a… LOAN in order to avoid a gift-tax filing.

Let’s hover on that for a second and the word in its original landscape. Loan.

Now look at this quote Mandelson recently gave to The Times, and here you’ll see the one word that Mandelson has used in his attempt to reframe this financial transaction.

“The idea that giving Reinaldo an osteopath bursary is going to sway mine or anyone else’s views about banking policy is risible.” (Peter Mandelson).

Bursary.

That’s the one word. Once a speaker introduces a moralised term, everything downstream is reframed. The listener is nudged away from scrutiny and towards interpretation. Mandelson here is simultaneously dismissing the public standpoint; minimising everyone’s feelings over this, and using the one word that is doing all the leverage in this article.

He would have prevaricated on the usage of ‘bursary’ and the best way in which to use it. He claims it was initially used by Epstein himself but that fact is irrelevant. That he chose to use it here, in this context is the tell. It’s a word that reframes everything (in his eyes). Distracts. Softens financial transactions between himself, his partner and Jeffrey Epstein into something almost benign. One word, carefully chosen, to recast money as kindness. And this is a classic linguistic trickery. But - this is no longer the dark lord of spin at work – it’s instead, someone spinning out over his own deplorable actions.

The gap between these two modes of language, public spin vs private communication, is where truth lives, and this time, it all hinges on seven letters. The power of language, folks. Words - they’re always a giveaway!

For more insight into the psychology of human language, hit the subscribe button below.