Most people will recognise these words from their childhood.

Sticks and stones may break my bones

But words shall never hurt me.

The rhyme is used as a defence against name-calling and verbal bullying. Had we been less concerned about dealing with the bullying we may have marvelled at the power of the first three words, sticks and stones. They are an example of an irreversible binomial, a pair or group of words, used together in a fixed order that cannot be changed. We never say honey and milk, bees and birds or sweet and short for example. We are never taught this, the power of language forces us to use that particular order. 

Something else we are not taught gave rise to Tik-Tok rather than Tok-Tik and before that KitKat and Flip-Flops. This phenomenon is called ablaut reduplication; a word is repeated with a slight change for dramatic effect – bish, bash, bosh. There is a definite order of vowels i, a, o. Hence, we never say clop clip or tock tick.

So, as you can see, words have power and exert their control over us. Great orators know this, think of Mark Anthony’s speech in the Shakespeare play Julius Caesar or in real life Churchill’s  ‘we shall fight them on the beaches’ speech where he used repetition to great effect, as did Dr Martin Luther King, Jr in his ‘I have a dream’ speech. Unfortunately, people in business have, either by laziness or accident, found a way to negate the power of words and that is by using acronyms and initials.

Consider TCF, it was a term that was central to the approach to financial service regulation used by the Financial Services Authority (now the Financial Conduct Authority) in its early years. Banks developed systems, forms and boxes to tick to show they were ‘TCF compliant’. TCF stands for Treating Customers Fairly and we know from the various scandals: endowment policy mis-selling, Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) mis-selling & pension mis-selling, etc. that customers were not treated fairly, they were exploited. Had the conversations been around ‘are we Treating Customers Fairly? Rather than are we ‘TCF compliant’ things may have been different. People would not have been disadvantaged and the banks would have not suffered reputational damage, incurred massive fines and now be subject to further regulation. Treating is defined as ‘behaving towards or dealing with in a certain way’ so is something that we do and have control over. A Customer is ‘a person who buys goods or services’ so they are people and how we deal with them will affect them. Fairly is about justice, behaving according to what is morally right. Those words have power, especially ‘fairly’. TCF doesn’t.

A more recent initialisation is ED & I, which sounds like a hospital department and hides some powerful words. Equality (the state of being equal, especially in status, rights, or opportunities), Diversity (a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, experiences, etc.)  Inclusion (being included within a group or structure). Wow imagine how buzzing your business would be with a diverse group of people all with the opportunity to be an integrated and valued part of the team where differences are celebrated. 

Or you could save yourself about one second by saying ‘ED & I’ rather than Equality, Diversity & Inclusion, tick a few of the ED & I boxes and miss out on all that richness.