semantic monopoly
I’ve never been much of a dancer…
But in 2004, I lived in Washington DC and briefly dated a tango instructor. It’s how I was introduced to the culture of milongas, a late night social tango party.
At the time a new sound was making its way onto the dance floor. Electronica-beats mixed with classical tango. A wild fusion of world music, trip-hop, dub step, and beyond.
Nobody had a name for it.
I was early in my narrative practice, and Sharna, an old friend, was trying to describe this rising cultural phenomenon. One day, over coffee, we gave it a name: Neotango.
Sharna wrote a blog post on it, and it quickly took off from dancers to DJs to festival flyers. Somewhere in there it stopped being Sharna’s word and became the category’s. Two decades later, it’s just what this music is called.
For an introduction to the genre, check out Gotan Project or this longer list.
Whoever names it, owns it.
That’s the topic of this week’s newsletter.
Picture a leader who hears their own words describing their category in a place they were never present. A grant application. A competitor’s pitch deck. A regulator’s language. An AI answer written for someone three companies away. The words they almost never bothered to write down are the ones the field now uses by default.
Getting there is rare, because it cuts against how the game is usually played. You’re differentiating inside a category someone else named, so every pitch answers a competitor’s frame. You can out-think your whole market and still be renting a position in a house another company built. That’s a share game, and a share game caps you.
Last week we talked about giving your narrative a long enough half-life to compound. This is what compounding buys you once it runs long enough.
Bigger Than a Bigger Slice
The most valuable position in any category isn’t market share. It’s owning the language the field uses to describe itself.
When your words become the default way people name the problem, the opportunity, and the stakes, everyone else is drafting off you. That’s a Semantic Monopoly. A market-making move. You’ve defined the category everyone else competes inside.
You build it the slow way. You codify a small set of ownable phrases, the ones that say here’s what we do and here’s what this whole space is, and you repeat them until they stop sounding like yours and start sounding like everyone’s.
There’s a discipline underneath it: knowing which language to spread and which to protect. The category language, the name and the thesis for the whole space, you give away on purpose. The more freely it travels, the bigger the category you anchor, and every company that adopts it is extending your position for you, usually without noticing. Your proprietary language, the codified frameworks and coined terms that are distinctly yours, you protect, because that’s the asset everyone else drafts from.
There’s a third layer between those two, the shared argument a coalition of partners carries in their own voices, and it’s where most ecosystem work quietly breaks. That one’s a longer conversation. If you’re living in it, reply and tell me.
The Machines Inherit Whoever Named It
AI raises the stakes on all of this.
Models scale whatever language they inherit. So the terms your field uses become the terms its AI repeats, at volume, across every output. Own the language and you own what the whole category generates from. Leave it unowned and the machines default to someone else’s frame, or to the flat average of everyone’s.
This is the rare position AI can’t erode. The models in your category are already running on somebody’s words.
The only question is whose.
Strip the Names and the Move Repeats
A coalition in a new category of frontier tech, with real regulatory stakes, reduced a sprawling mission to one named problem. Their funders realized the named problem was the actual product. A wide range of players who would never fully agree could suddenly pull the same direction, because they’d all inherited the same language.
A global life-sciences company wrote the words for how breakthroughs clear regulatory approval. The industry adopted them. The framing traveled all the way up to the regulators themselves. Now they’re the source everyone else drafts from.
You already know the finished version. Salesforce named “the cloud,” and an industry reorganized around the word. Palantir built around the word “ontology” for data, and for that world and use case, the word is now theirs.
And it’s continuous work. A membership organization I’m working with is building the shared language for its whole field right now. It’s the hardest part of the job, because coherence across a network isn’t everyone saying the same words, it’s everyone making the same argument in their own voice.
The One Phrase You’d Make a Rival Use
The move takes 5 minutes.
Name the one phrase you’d want your whole category to adopt.
The words you’d want a competitor forced to reach for in their next deck. Then start saying it, everywhere, in every memo and talk and prompt, until it turns into wallpaper.
Does your language travel without you in the room? That’s the tell: the words showing up where you never were, carried by people you never briefed.
Someone’s language becomes the default your category thinks in. The only question is whether it’s yours.
That default now has to hold across every agent your company runs, not just the people who work there. There’s a language layer a category thinks with, both humans and machines. That’s what we’ve been building toward with Storied AI: an ontology for strategy and comms, not just data. More on that soon.
Michael
P.S. Sharna never trademarked neotango. That’s exactly why it won.
P.S.S. When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help:
If you want a second set of eyes on your narrative, reply and tell me more
If you need narrative architecture, I help CEOs & operators do just that. Apply for Q3
If you need a keynote speaker, I do them on a select basis. Let’s talk