I was watching a round table dialogue on a cable news channel and one of the participants, again and again, kept saying, “I would like to inform you.” I found it rather condescending. She seemed to see herself as superior to everyone at the table. Each time the phrase came around, the room seemed to shift slightly. The other panelists held their faces a little more carefully. Whatever was about to be said arrived against a small resistance that had not been there a moment before.

At first I thought the reaction was just irritation with a verbal tic. People develop habits of speech under the pressure of live television, and most of them mean nothing. But the more the listening continued, the clearer it became that this one was doing real work. The discomfort was not about the words themselves. It was about the relationship the words kept setting up between the speaker and everyone else in the room, including the viewer at home.

To inform someone is to act on a gap you have already decided is there. The speaker knows. The listener does not. The speaker fills what the listener lacks. That is the quiet logic inside the verb, and when the verb gets repeated, the logic stops being quiet. It becomes a posture. It is the posture of a teacher addressing students who never enrolled, the posture of an expert lecturing a room of laypeople who never asked for the lecture. This is not a complaint about word choice. Something larger is happening when a public commentator settles into that verb as a reflex. The rest of this essay is an attempt to say what.

Every sentence assumes something about the person hearing it. This is easy to miss because the assumption is usually buried in small words, the kind we do not notice until something goes wrong. A teacher saying “open your books to page forty” assumes a room of students. A doctor saying “the results came back clear” assumes a patient who has been waiting for news. The words fit the relationship, and when they fit, no one thinks about them.

The Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin spent much of his life pointing out that this fit is not accidental. When we speak, we are not just sending information into the air. We are building a particular kind of relationship with whoever is listening, and we build it through the shape of our sentences before the content even arrives.¹

Bakhtin noticed two basic ways speakers can position their hearers. In the first, the speaker treats the listener as someone who needs to receive what the speaker already knows. The listener’s job is to take it in. In the second, the speaker treats the listener as someone who has their own thoughts about the matter, who might agree, push back, add something, or see it differently. The listener’s job is to respond. The words are often the same. The relationship is very different.²

This is where the verb “inform” gives itself away. To inform someone is to assume a gap and move to fill it. The listener has not been asked whether the gap is there. The speaker has decided. Compare this to verbs like “consider,” “notice,” or “think about.” These assume the listener is already in the conversation, already capable of working something out. “Consider that this policy has three unintended consequences” and “I would like to inform everyone that this policy has three unintended consequences” deliver the same facts. They do not deliver the same encounter.

So, the discomfort with the phrase is not a quibble about wording. The wording is the visible part of something larger. It signals what kind of exchange the speaker thinks is happening. A commentator who keeps reaching for instructional verbs is, knowingly or not, refusing the back-and-forth the setting calls for. Viewers feel this even when they cannot name it. They know the difference between being talked with and being talked at, and they register it quickly. Our verbs are not decoration. They are the shape of the relationship we are offering the person on the other side of the words.

Bakhtin had a particular way of describing what happens when speech turns into a posture rather than an exchange. He called it monologic speech. The word sounds technical, but the idea is simple. Monologic speech treats meaning as already finished. The speaker has worked it out. The listener is there to take it in. Nothing the listener thinks or says will change what is being said. The word is closed before it leaves the speaker’s mouth.³

The opposite, what Bakhtin called dialogic speech, treats meaning as something that comes into being between people. The speaker offers something. The listener works on it. The exchange shapes what the meaning turns out to be. The word is open. It expects a response, and the response is part of how the meaning gets made.⁴

This distinction does real work once you have it. Most of what we say in ordinary life is dialogic without our trying. We talk with friends, family, coworkers, and the talk shifts as it goes. We rephrase, qualify, adjust, sometimes change our minds in mid-sentence because of a look on the other person’s face. The exchange is alive. Nobody experiences this as instruction.

Monologic speech belongs to a narrower set of situations. A judge delivers a verdict. A pilot announces a landing. A teacher gives instructions for a test. In each case, the closed word is appropriate because the role calls for it. The judge is not inviting deliberation about the verdict. The pilot is not inviting alternative views about the landing. The form fits the function.

The trouble starts when monologic speech leaks into settings where it does not belong. A round table on a news program is not a courtroom or a classroom. It is built on the premise that several people will think out loud together in front of an audience, that views will rub against each other, that something might emerge that none of the participants would have arrived at alone. The format is dialogic by design. When a participant defaults to “I would like to inform you,” they are smuggling the closed word into a setting that asks for the open one.

This is why the phrase grates even when the content is fine. The content is doing one thing. The form is doing another. The viewer registers the mismatch as condescension because that is what it is. The speaker has taken a posture the situation does not authorize, and everyone in the room, including the camera, can feel it.

It is worth saying plainly. A speaker who settles into this verb as a reflex usually sees herself as superior to the room. The self-perception rarely announces itself as arrogance from the inside. It feels to her like accuracy. She has done the reading; she has the credentials or the access the others lack and so informing them is what the moment calls for. The asymmetry is dressed as service. That is what makes the posture so durable. It is sustained by a self-image the speaker experiences as competence rather than pride, which is precisely why it is so hard to dislodge and so plain to everyone else.

There is one more piece of Bakhtin worth bringing in, because it explains why this particular tic has become so common. Late in his life, Bakhtin wrote that every utterance has more than one audience. There is the visible listener, the person actually in the room. But there is also a further audience the speaker imagines, the one the speech is really aimed at. Bakhtin sometimes called this the super-addressee. It is the audience over the shoulder of the actual hearer, the one the speaker hopes will eventually understand, validate, remember.⁵

You can hear this in everyday life once you start listening for it. A father correcting his son at the dinner table is also addressing his own father, dead for twenty years. A pastor preaching to a small congregation is also addressing the larger Church across time. A scholar writing a footnote is also addressing colleagues who will read the footnote a decade later. The visible audience is real. The further audience is also real, sometimes more real to the speaker than the people actually in the room.

This helps explain what is happening on the news panel. The other panelists are the visible audience. But the commentator’s real audience is the watching public, and beyond them, the imagined audience the commentator wants to be seen by. That imagined audience includes the producers, the future bookers, the readers of the commentator’s column, and the crowd on social media that will clip the segment in the morning. The verb “inform” is not really aimed at the panelists. It is aimed at the audience the commentator is performing competence for.

This is why the phrase proliferates. It is not chosen because it fits the conversation. It is chosen because it signals authority to the audience the commentator is actually addressing, the one not in the room. The panelists are props. The viewers are witnesses. The performance is for someone else.

Once you see this, the condescension comes into sharper focus. The commentator is not really condescending to the panelists, though it lands that way. The commentator has stopped treating the panelists as the people being addressed at all. They have been turned into a backdrop in front of which the commentator can be seen informing. That is what the room is feeling. It is not just hierarchy. It is displacement. The conversation has been hollowed out and put to a different use.

The fix is not a list of better verbs. Verbs follow the posture beneath them, and if the posture stays the same, swapping vocabulary will only produce a more polished version of the same condescension. What changes the speech is a change in attention to who is actually in the room, to what they bring, to what they might already know, and to what they might say back.

You can hear the difference at the level of a single sentence. “I would like to inform everyone that the policy has three unintended consequences” announces a deficit and moves to fill it. “Three unintended consequences are worth weighing here” sets the consequences on the table for the room to look at together. The first sentence ends with the speaker. The second sentence ends with the listener picking something up. The content is identical. The encounter is not.

This is the offer Bakhtin’s dialogic speech actually makes. Not a softening of authority, not a performance of humility, but a real recognition that the people on the other side of the words have something to bring. They are not waiting to be filled. They are already thinking. The speaker who knows this speaks differently, and the difference is audible without ever being announced.

The habit takes practice, especially for people whose work involves talking in public. The pull toward the closed word is strong, partly because it feels safer. The closed word cannot really be argued with. The open word can. To offer something rather than inform someone is to accept that the offer might be refused, qualified, sent back changed. That is the cost of dialogue, and it is also what makes dialogue worth having.

Public deliberation depends on speakers treating one another as peers capable of reply. When commentary becomes a performance aimed at an audience that is not in the room, the people in the room stop being addressed at all, and the conditions for shared reasoning begin to erode. The verb is small. The aggregate is not. A culture in which everyone is informing, and no one is offering has lost something it will not easily get back.

Endnotes

¹. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 280.

². Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 292–93.

³. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 292–93.

⁴. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 279–80.

⁵. Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 126.

Written by Mark J. Chironna, PhD.

Dr. Mark Chironna is a public scholar, executive and personal coach, and thought leader with five decades of experience in leadership development, cultural analysis, and future-focused strategies. With advanced degrees in Psychology, Applied Semiotics and Futures Studies, and Theology, he brings a unique interdisciplinary approach to helping individuals and organizations navigate complexity, unlock potential, and craft innovative solutions.

As a Board Certified Coach with over 30,000 hours of experience, he empowers leaders and teams to thrive through resilience, foresight, and actionable strategies. Passionate about human flourishing, he integrates psychological insight and cultural trends to inspire growth and transformation.

WEBSITE::  www.markchironna.com