Out with the Old?

As I've mentioned before, English is a constantly-evolving language, and this is one of the things that keeps it vibrant and growing. By some estimates, there are upwards of 600,000 words in the English language.

That being said, you would be hard pressed to find someone familiar enough with even a 10th of these words to use them in everyday conversation. Some words are timeless, changing little in pronunciation or meaning over the centuries. For instance, right now I'm reading a book entitled, Mozart's Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music (I highly recommend it, by the way). Every single word in this title means exactly what it meant when it first entered the language.

Other words have been around for a long time, but their meanings have changed over the years, some more than once. For instance, according to the Arcade Dictionary of Word Origins, passion used to mean suffer, specifically the suffering of Christ on the cross. Sometime around the 16th century it came to mean strong emotion, often of a sexual nature. Terse used to mean smooth. Glamor was originally an alternative pronunciation of grammar. Later it came to mean enchantment, and only in the 19th century did it acquire its current meaning.

Then there are the words that still exist but that nobody uses, like “wherefore.” It's a good thing nobody uses it, because very few of us would use it properly. It means “why,” not “where.” When Juliet pleads, “wherefore art thou Romeo?,” what she means is, “why did I have to fall in love with a Montague?” We still use “typewriter,” but we're going to use it less and less as fewer and fewer of us remember what they were.

It's very important to make sure you and your audience are speaking the same language. A lot has been said and written about the younger members of the workforce – how they perceive work, how they want to interact with their managers, etc. People who work in employee communications need to take these preferences into account when communicating to younger workers. On the other hand, they can't ignore the needs of older workers either.

Perhaps for the first time we're seeing people acknowledging a variety of age demographics when communicating internally. In the past, the organization spoke with one voice in just a small number of official communications channels, such as newsletters, memos and (later) emails. Now the organizations with the most engaged and informed employees are using multiple channels to get their messaging out.

They're still sending all-staff emails, and there's no reason to stop this practice anytime in the near future, but forward-looking organizations are using other tools as well. They're holding video conferences, their leaders are blogging – and posting comments in real time, and managers are going into the field to speak with employees where they work. That's not exactly high-tech, but it's effective.

In the end, what matters is not what channels you use, whether you're on Twitter or have fully integrated Web 2.0 into your intranet. What matters is that you're considering all of your audiences and are using the most effective means available to engage them. And that means, in part, speaking to them in language that they understand and feel comfortable with.