Fix the culture, Julian pleaded. Tell me who is lying and who is leaving.

As Julian left, Aris turned back to his monitor. He looked at a draft of an email he was writing to his own estranged daughter. He saw the "I"s piling up like a wall, a testament to his own ego and his need to be right. With a sigh, he began to delete them, searching for a "you" that might finally bridge the gap.

Aris didn't look at the complaints or the project updates. He ran the text through his software, stripping away the jargon. He was looking for the fingerprints of the psyche: function words.

The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say The office of Dr. Aris Thorne was a sanctuary of silence, save for the rhythmic clicking of a mechanical keyboard. Aris was a computational linguist, a man who didn't listen to what people said, but how they said it. To him, nouns and verbs were the flashy actors on a stage, but the pronouns—the "I," "me," "we," and "they"—were the invisible stagehands holding the entire production together.

You use 'we' constantly, Aris noted, tapping a finger on a graph. But look at the context.