We're going to review and elaborate on the concept of the Words Under the Words. And we're going to do that by exploring a term that may be familiar to many of you, especially if you have spent any time on university campuses or in corporate America. Impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome is characterized by the feeling that you are a fraud. That you don't belong. That you're not qualified to be in a certain program or hold a particular job and will soon be found out. What's interesting for our purposes is that one of the psychologists who first called attention to these feelings, Pauline Rose Clance, objects to the actual term, impostor syndrome. She wishes it were called what she and her coauthor Suzanne Imes called it in their original paper back in 1978: impostor phenomenon. She'd also prefer "impostor experience."" Comparing those two phrases, impostor syndrome versus impostor experience, tells us a lot about the Words Under the Words. The Words Under the Words of impostor syndrome are things like illness, disease, abnormal, permanent. Whereas the Words Under the Words of impostor experience are much less negative and isolating. An experience is something anyone can have, so the connotation is more like common, routine, part of life, temporary. Here's how Clance herself explains the difference. "If I could do it all over again, I would call it the impostor experience, because it's not a syndrome or a complex or a mental illness; it's something almost everyone experiences." Think about these kinds of choices the next time you label something, and certainly the next time you label someone, including yourself. The preface to Doing Grammar by Max Morenberg is a fun example of this. "The term grammar," he says, "will generally make people grimace and snarl. When I want to free myself from a particularly obnoxious person at a cocktail party, all I have to do is tell them I'm a grammarian. Without fail, he'll lower his head and sidle away, mumbling into his shirt collar, 'I never did well at that in school.' When I like the person and want to continue the conversation, I say I'm a linguist." But often the stakes are much higher than that. Like in the novel Bear Town by Fredrik Backman, where a passionate hockey town in Sweden struggled to face the fact of sexual assault. At one point, Backman, who is also the author of the mega best-seller, A Man Called Ove, writes a sentence that nicely sums up the whole idea of the Words under the Words, and if perhaps something all of us would do well to remember: "Words are not small things".