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Reflections 18th June
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Reflections 18th June

On sterility of our business language

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Richard Merrick
Jun 18, 2023
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Reflections 18th June
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Photo by Leonardo Toshiro Okubo on Unsplash

The notion of language has remained on my mind since last week’s post, and something about it has been niggling at me; that feeling we get when we know something we are sensing will get resolved where we least expect it to; in my case, an interesting post on LinkedIn relating to fascism. A bit heavy, perhaps, but powerful, so please bear with me for a moment.

“All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Nicole Morgan Ph.D

And there it was. Language, especially in its written form, is the way our thoughts become known and, as such, is one of the most precious things our civilisation has.

Unless we are intimate with it, and respect it for what it is - a crucible in which we refine our thinking - we are reducing ourselves to processors of middle-of-the-road mediocrity. We become unchallenging passengers on someone else’…

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