The future is conjugated, too

It can reassure, build confidence or make someone feel they belong. It can also confine, label or reduce a person to something they may never have chosen to be.

In 2025, I found an article whose title was precisely The power and pain of words. It examined how the language used with patients after an adverse medical experience can help repair harm or, conversely, make it worse. ^[1]

Another clinical trial from the same year, conducted in hospital spiritual care, found lower depression symptom scores after consultations with professionals trained in compassion. An exploratory analysis linked part of that result to the language used, which was more inclusive and focused on the other person. That relationship alone does not establish the effect of the language. ^[2]

Words are not medicines, but they are not harmless either.

Their influence also goes beyond how they make us feel. Research on linguistic relativity has spent decades asking how far the language we use participates in the way we perceive and organise reality. A theoretical article published in 2025 proposes understanding language, environment and cognition as closely intertwined processes. ^[3]

Here, inclusive language interests me, not as a formal correction, but as a very basic question: who comes to mind when we use a word?

A review published in 2025 examines what influences attitudes towards gender-inclusive language and its use. It covers factors such as sexist beliefs, social norms and the political context. Its introduction discusses earlier research on how the generic masculine can favour male mental representations and how inclusive forms can reduce that bias. ^[4]

That makes me think about something I care about deeply. Some inherited ideas survive not only because someone continues to defend them. Sometimes they survive because they remain hidden in our expressions, examples, jokes or in the people we automatically imagine when someone says “a scientist”, “a leader” or “a family”.

Repeating a word does not mean sharing everything it has historically carried. But I do not think we can pretend that language leaves no mark either.

I am convinced that we have some responsibility for the words we choose. Not because changing vocabulary will magically change the world. But because words take part in our beliefs. Beliefs influence expectations and decisions. And decisions, repeated over years, can end up changing the course of a life. I do not know whether science can measure something as large as destiny. But I find it increasingly hard to believe that how we name the path leading towards it makes no difference.

Perhaps the future begins there too, in the words we choose to keep conjugating.