Nodes make me feel unpretty.

Or basically a negative prefix is a nongood thing.

Which of these is easier on your brain: nonsmoker or smoker?

Do or undo?

Proper or improper?

And if you’re like, “Oh ugh she’s wading through the minutia of word choice again,” then welcome to my newsletter! You should subscribe so you can waste many a 5-min span becoming the most stealth persuasion geek on the planet. #wordsforsmartpeople #moneywords

So if you guessed that nonsmoker (smoker), undo (do) and improper (proper) were all harder (easier) for the brain to understand and in turn recall, you win a free subscription to this free newsletter! Not that you need it because you’re exactly right and know your shit - but the question, of course, is why.

And the answer, of course, is morphemes.

Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in language. When you combine morphemes, you create new words or change the meaning of existing words. If “can” is a morpheme and “not” is a morpheme and you combine them, you get “cannot,” which has a whole new meaning.

Sounds easy and fun, right?

Tell that to your brain.

Your brain (and mine - no judgment) is lazy. It uses a lot of calories and tries not to work too hard because it hasn’t got wise to the fact that we’re in the golden age of on-demand calorie delivery yet. So it’s lazy. (To be fair, it’s kinduv advanced as far as tools go, so it’s not as lazy as, say, your pinky toe, which is like just begging evolution to do away with it.)

To make matters worse, the part of our brain that processes language is way younger than the part of our brain that kept us safe from the clutches of a T-Rex. Which. We were alive at the same time. For this image to work.

So 1) our brain is lazy and 2) it’s made up of parts and 3) the part that processes language is pretty new to the world…

When our lazy brain tries to create meaning out of the word-like sounds it hears or word-like shapes it reads, it goes Woah slow down let’s keep it simple because I’m practically a baby or at best a lizard. And it looks for component parts that it can put together. It looks for…

Morphological nodes.

(It looks for all kinds of nodes, to be fair, but this is a newsletter not Chomsky 401.)

A morphological node is the smallest meaningful unit of language (aka a morpheme) OR the points in a word where morphemes are attached / combined.

So we’ve got SMOKER and NONSMOKER.

Smoker is a single morphological node with a small single unit of meaning: one who smokes.

Nonsmoker is two nodes / morphemes combined: “non” plus one who smokes.

SO IT’S HARDER FOR YOUR BRAIN TO PROCESS.

Side note: I have started just LOVING all caps.

What do we do with this, in the context of Money Words?

So the book I’m writing is tentatively called Money Words, and it’s all about the words… that… make you… money. But it’s also about how easily we lose money - by which I also mean persuasive potency - when we are lazy in our word choice, accidentally use the wrong words or simply outsource our word choice (and in turn persuasion / ability to sell and make money) to generative AI.

What’s curious for me - and hopefully for you - as I research this book is how we can better understand WHY messages do and do not work, beyond the old ho-hum Marketing 101 stuff about features vs benefits and “what’s in it for me.”

And in this one study, the authors (Freeman, Shapiro, Brucks, 2009) raise their eyebrows at the age-old “wisdom” that holds a positively framed message can outperform a negatively framed message. They noticed that the results of experiments around positive vs negative message framing often contradict each other. They also noticed something interesting about the word choices in many a conflicting study:

Results of the studies may have been impacted by (basically) whether the ad in question used words made of multiple morphological nodes.

As in:

Do not be a smoker is easier to understand than Be a nonsmoker.

If you threw your Chomsky out the window and tested Do not be a smoker against Be a nonsmoker and found that Do not be a smoker outperformed Be a nonsmoker, you might jump to the conclusion that that negative message framing of “Do not be a smoker” is what made it more powerful than “Be a nonsmoker.”

However.

By considering how our lazy brains actually process words and make meaning - and in turn make decisions - we could break each of those sentences down into their node components to see which is more complex to process.

Do = node

Not = node

Be = node

A = node

Smoker = node

vs

Be = node

A = node

Nonsmoker = two nodes

Our little baby language-processing brain needs a little more time to process Be a nonsmoker. Which was supported by not one but two experiments that Freeman et al ran. Which led them to conclude:

• Marketers should develop new affirmative words (ideally single node) to replace words that are a negation of a word - for example, “safe sex” is better than “unprotected sex”

For marketers like you and me, we can consider this in our high-level work - like branding and positioning - all the way down to our execution-level work, like writing a welcome email for new subscribers (she said as she went off to re-read her welcome email for new subscribers).

What if Unbounce had been called Stay?

What if health campaigns called cheeseburgers “harmful” instead of “unhealthy”?

Maybe politicians are clever to call it an “untruth” instead of a “lie” if they want people to struggle to make meaning from their statement…

Now this does not mean that words with greater complexity than a single node are bad in marketing. Not at all! I think often of the study of “infertility disability” vs “infertility condition” - so many nodes, so little time. (The study is covered in my welcome email.)

We can handle complexity.

But when you and I are optimizing for persuasiveness…

It seems an easier, better case is made for defaulting to the clearest words possible. From there, it’s up to us to use other insights into how we make meaning so that we can take our phrasing to the best place possible for our reader / listener.

Which is what my book is about.

And this newsletter.

So there’s never been a better time to:

~jo :)

Change your words. Change your world.