Learning the Language: From Mine Shafts to M.Divs and Why We All End Up Speaking in Code

The words we use, the worlds they create, and the self that lives beneath them

Language has always fascinated me. Not just what we say, but how we say it—who gets to speak, who understands, and who gets left out. Growing up in the UK, I became fluent in the knowledge that your words could betray you. Not in the poetic, Shakespearean sense of tragedy and betrayal, but in the small, gritty reality of class, geography, and culture.

In the town where I was born, just two generations before me, your dialect would have identified not just your county or your football team—but which mine you worked in. Each coal mine had its own vocabulary, its own rhythms of speech, its own musicality. Language shaped underground in soot and sweat, and passed around pint glasses at the working men’s club.

When I moved cross-country as a child, I learned that even a few dozen miles was enough to make you sound foreign. I had the wrong accent, the wrong words, and I was corrected or teased accordingly. “You call it what?” they'd ask, bewildered. And so you learn. You pick up the words of the place you're in. You become a mimic. Not because you're trying to be someone else, but because you're trying to be understood. And not just understood—but accepted.

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If you’ve never lived in England, this might be hard to grasp. But language there isn’t just functional. It’s a class marker. A tribal badge. A way of saying, I’m from here. I belong. One of the best illustrations of this is the humble bread roll. Or bap. Or cob. Or stotty cake. There are entire regional maps of the UK based on what we call that one item. I remember staring at one in fascination—it was funny, yes, but it was also a kind of map of identity. These weren’t just different words. They were different worlds.

In England, the words used to describe someone who spoke differently were achingly familiar: foreigner—one who does not belong. So if language indicates belonging, and changes with the environment you are in, what does that mean about the truth of the language we use? Can words ever really help us define who we are? Or are they always, at some level, circumstantial—shaped by the people around us, the expectations of the space we occupy, the identities we’re trying to signal? If the words I use change from town to town, from job to job, even from platform to platform—am I changing too? Or am I just bending to be understood? The more I’ve watched language shift around me, the more I’ve come to suspect that it tells us less about who we are, and more about what we need to survive. And maybe that’s why silence matters so much—because it’s the only place where we’re not trying to survive. We’re just being.

The Internet as a New Dialect

Years later, I found myself in a different world altogether: the digital one. And with it came a new kind of fluency to master. I had to learn how the internet worked—not just technically, but linguistically. I learned SEO and keyword strategy. I learned how to write headlines that ranked and tweets that got shared. I learned the rules of engagement: brevity, clarity, clickability.

And once again, I realized that if you didn’t speak the language, you didn’t exist. At least not in a way that mattered. You might have something important to say, but if you couldn't translate it into the code of that space, no one would ever hear it.

So I adapted again. I learned the language of virality. Then the language of business: decks, deliverables, “circle back,” “ping me,” “let’s put a pin in that.” At some point, I found myself using phrases I once would have mocked. But they were efficient. They were recognized. They got things done.

And that, too, was a lesson: that language isn’t always about meaning. Sometimes, it’s about being fluent in the shorthand of power. Knowing the buzzwords lets you pass. Not knowing them keeps you out.

When the Language Doesn’t Fit

But what happens when the language of the place is one you can’t learn? Or worse, when it runs completely counter to the ways you think and speak?

That’s what happened when I worked at Bouy, a Harvard-incubated start-up full of extremely bright people from elite academic backgrounds. The mission was admirable. The people were thoughtful. But the language—oh, the language.

Every conversation was couched in the dialect of “the elite”: intersectionality, equity frameworks. It wasn’t just jargon—it was a whole worldview, expressed in a code I hadn’t been raised to speak. These weren’t my rhythms. I could translate the goals into business terms, I could see where the money was going, I could draw up a plan—but I couldn’t speak their language fluently. And because of that, I never quite felt at home.

It took me a long time to realize: it wasn’t about competency. It wasn’t about performance. It was about fluency—and that meant cultural fluency, not linguistic.

They weren’t doing anything wrong. But the language of the institution was built by people who had all passed through the same kinds of gates. And like all tightly knit dialects, it was designed—consciously or not—to keep the insiders in and the outsiders at arm’s length.

The Language of the Church

Then I moved into church work, and encountered another dialect altogether—older, slower, cloaked in tradition and scripture. The Church has its own vocabulary, and it’s not just spiritual. It’s structural, institutional, even bureaucratic.

I remember reading job postings for things like “Canon for Property Management.” The language struck me: so elevated, so specific—and yet, so disconnected from the actual responsibilities involved. You didn’t need to know how to preach or counsel or pray. You needed to know how to manage real estate. And yet the role required seminary credentials. Why?

Because the church, like the university, has its own form of credentialed fluency. The M.Div. isn’t just a theology degree—it’s a linguistic conversion process. It teaches you how to speak like a priest—not just about God, but about meetings, money, mission, and maintenance. It’s the language you need to be fluent in for priests and bishops to take you seriously. You don’t need an M.Div. to manage property, but it functions as a kind of social lubricant in the environment where your stakeholders live.

And here again, I started to see the pattern. This system, like many other educational systems, wasn't primarily about transferring knowledge. They were about transferring language. Teaching you how to say things the right way, so that others in the club would recognize you.

And maybe, if we’re honest, that’s part of what the Catechism is too. It’s not just about teaching what to believe—it’s about teaching how to talk about belief in a way that signals, I belong here. It offers a shared vocabulary for faith, one that’s specific to a tradition. Because the truth is, even within Christianity, the same words mean different things depending on who's saying them.

Take something as simple as “listening to the Spirit.” A Pentecostal might mean visions, utterances, a word of knowledge delivered mid-worship. An Episcopalian might mean a sense of internal prompting, quietly discerned over weeks, preferably with a committee. We’re using the same phrase, but we’re not speaking the same language.

I’ll never forget when an Episcopal bishop once called me a prophet. I cried. The word hit me like a thunderclap—heavy, impossible, terrifying. But when I told a charismatic friend about it, she just blinked and said, “Why? There are loads of prophets.” To her, it was a role, almost a category—commonplace in her vocabulary. To me, it was sacred, singular, and slightly absurd. Same word. Two entirely different worlds.

That’s what the Catechism does—it teaches not just what we believe, but how we sound when we believe it. It shapes the metaphors we reach for, the terms we avoid, the way we talk about God, and—just as importantly—the way we talk about ourselves. It forms a kind of liturgical accent, one that marks us as insiders, even when the beliefs themselves might overlap with others outside our denomination.

The Language of Self

But it doesn't stop with institutions. Our language now reaches inward. We speak about ourselves differently than we did twenty years ago.

Online culture has developed its own dialect of identity: diagnosis-speak, therapy-speak, trauma-speak. I see it in myself and everyone I know. We use phrases like “emotional labor,” “holding space,” “dysregulation,” “anxious attachment,” “executive dysfunction.” Some of these concepts are incredibly useful. They offer clarity, relief, and community.

But they also subtly shape how we experience ourselves. When we name something, we start to see it everywhere. Language creates pattern. It sets expectation. And it defines what is normal—even if that normal is “neurodivergent.”

Again, I’m not criticizing the language itself. But I’m noticing that the way we talk about ourselves changes who we think we are. And it begs the question: if the words came from somewhere else—an online trend, a TikTok explainer, a therapist’s framework—then how do we separate our true experience from the language we’ve borrowed to describe it?

So Then, Who Are You?

If language distorts—if it reflects not just who you are but where you are—then how do you ever find out who you are outside the system?

If your words have always been shaped by the region, the profession, the ideology, the algorithm—what happens when you want to go beyond all of that?

How do you know the you beneath the words?

Not the version of you trained to speak fluent business.
Not the you who’s mastered church-speak or activist-speak.
Not even the you who narrates your anxiety in the language of Instagram stories.

The you that has no script.
The you that existed before you were taught to describe yourself.

That’s the self I’m interested in. And I’m starting to believe that the only way to reach it is through silence.

Because silence isn’t neutral. It’s radical.

It strips away performance. It exposes what we don't know. It holds us in tension. In silence, we can’t edit. We can’t impress. We can’t code-switch. We just sit.

And in that stillness, strange things happen. Feelings surface that have no labels. Questions arrive that have no answers. And if we’re brave enough to stay, we might start to hear something deeper—something truer than any dialect can contain.

The one who doesn’t need words to be known.

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