Brands do this constantly. They reach for words that still feel alive inside the building but sound half-dead by the time they reach another human being. Disruptive has been through too much. Authentic now arrives wearing a name tag.
I’m gonna date myself. It’s okay, I found myself on a dating site called KnowU. I read my profile, had a few video chats, and now, I think I might go with myself for a nice dinner. None of that is true. But what’s true is when anyone says, “I’m dating myself, but …” that’s what goes through my head. Someone who started therapy, found themself and liked themself so much, they started dating themselves. Of course, I know that dating yourself is really just a self-conscious jibe at one’s own age. However, I just Googled the phrase to find out when it was first used, and I discovered that dating yourself is an actual thing. Like a self-help idea. It involves spending time with yourself doing stuff, thinking about yourself, evaluating yourself, and all this leads to eventually marrying yourself and then, of course, the emotional pain of a divorce from yourself.
I digress.
Hooey. That’s what I was thinking about today, Hooey. Specifically, a bunch of hooey for hooey, as we all know, comes in bunches. Like carrots, broccoli, and angina. That’s a bunch of hooey, an old man who grew up in the 40s might say. And those who were from the 40s as well, who may be gathered around this old man, would echo him with agreement, Hooey. You’re right, Abe, that’s just a bunch of hooey. Now, Dave, ever trying to fit in, says, "Yup, just a bag of hooey." Everyone stops and looks at Dave because they all know hooey comes by the bunch and not by the bag. Oh, you can have a bunch of hooey that you put in a bag for easy transport, but still, when referring to the entire thing, you say a bunch of hooey. So Abe says bunch, the group says bunch, Dave says bag, and the group beats Dave to death with their canes and dehumidifiers. They leave his body in the freezer with all the butter and Dixie cups of ice cream. The kind with the individually wrapped wooden spoon.
I digress, but a bit less.
Hooey. I was really thinking about the word hooey this morning as I made coffee, skimmed the Washington Post, and checked the status of the anatomically correct Gibbon I ordered from Gibbons R Us. Still not fulfilled. Neither the order nor myself. After seeing that my Gibbon wasn't packed and mailed, I was upset, but not super upset. Not upset enough to shriek and F-bomb at my neighbor’s koi pond. Which, by the way, I was walking past two days ago, and this one fish, orange and white, jumped up on the edge of the pond, waved her little tail, and winked at me. Koi my ass, that fish was a tramp. Anyway, I needed to express my anger, and what came out of me was, “Well, that’s just a bunch of hooey.” And it felt good. Familiar. Like an old friend I hadn’t seen for ages, and we picked up our conversation right where we left off. Hooey, I said, and hooey I meant.
This made me think I need to start a movement and drag great words and phrases back into the daily lexicon. Hooey. Hen fruit for eggs. Hoofer. Ameche, which somehow means telephone, because Don Ameche played Alexander Graham Bell, and apparently America used to have time for that kind of thing. All of them sitting dusty on a shelf, waiting for someone to conjure them again.
I’m not alone in this desire to bring back or drag into the light words that are perhaps past their prime. Brands do this constantly. They reach for words that still feel alive inside the building but sound half-dead by the time they reach another human being. Disruptive has been through too much. Authentic now arrives wearing a name tag. Delight should probably be allowed to lie down in a dark room until it remembers who it used to be.
But that’s the problem with bringing old language back. You have to know it’s old. That’s the difference between charm and embarrassment, and brands, bless their laminated little hearts, are not always good at hearing the age of their own words.
Some words arrive with a birth certificate
Words carry more than meaning. They carry age, rooms, habits, and little social odors you don’t always notice when you’re the one using them. Hooey doesn’t just mean nonsense. It brings a whole world with it. A man named Abe. A thermos. A certain kind of chair. Maybe a television with rabbit ears and someone asleep in front of a baseball game.
That’s why old words can be wonderful. They have texture, little elbows, and they’ve survived long enough to become specific. The trouble starts when a word thinks it’s younger than it is.
Brands do this constantly. They reach for language that still feels alive inside the building but sounds half-dead by the time it reaches another human being. Disruptive has been through too much. Authentic now arrives wearing a name tag. Delight should probably be allowed to lie down in a dark room until it remembers who it used to be.
None of these words is evil. That’s the annoying part. Most tired words started as useful words. They had a job. They pointed at something real. Then everyone found them, borrowed them, polished them, workshopped them, built decks around them, sold them to clients, ran them through approvals, and kept using them long after the original spark had wandered off to open a small ceramics studio in Vermont.
That’s how language gets dated. Not because it’s old, exactly, but because it’s been used without being heard. A brand says it’s human-centered because somewhere in the building, that still feels like a meaningful promise. The audience hears a phrase that’s been handled by every product team, consulting firm, and software platform, trying to sound less like a machine with a lobby.
A brand says it creates seamless experiences because the word still makes sense on paper. The customer hears a word so smooth it has no fingerprints left.
That’s the difference. Inside the building, the language still has intention. Outside the building, it has residue. And residue is hard to market.
Brands are bad at hearing themselves
The strange thing about dated language is that it rarely sounds dated to the people using it.
That’s true for all of us. We each carry a private little museum of words we still think are perfectly fine because they were perfectly fine when we first picked them up. We don’t hear the dust because the dust is ours. It settled slowly. We were there for it.
Brands have the same problem, only worse, because brand language usually has to pass through rooms full of people trying not to get murdered by consensus. By the time a phrase makes it into public, it has often been softened, approved, de-risked, and rinsed of anything that might make one person in a quarter-zip say, “Hmm, I don’t know.”
That’s how a company ends up sounding like every other company while believing it has found its voice.
Nobody sets out to say nothing, unless you’re a Trappist Monk, and if you are, why are you reading this? That’s the sad little truth of it. Most bland language begins with decent intentions. Someone wants the brand to sound warm, so they reach for human. Someone wants it to sound modern, so they reach for innovative. Someone wants it to sound easy, so they reach for trampy Koi. The words aren’t chosen because they’re exciting. They’re chosen because they feel safe, and safe words have a way of walking into the room wearing sensible shoes and then refusing to leave.
The trouble is, audiences don’t experience language the way internal teams do. Internal teams hear the strategy behind the word. They hear the meetings, the rationale, the stakeholder alignment, the careful little trail of breadcrumbs that led everyone there. The audience gets none of that. They just get the sentence.
And if the sentence sounds like something they’ve heard from a bank, a meal kit, a mattress company, and three software platforms before breakfast, the intention doesn’t matter much. The word may have meant something in the room. Outside the room, it becomes hooey.
The problem isn’t old language. It’s unaware language
Old language isn’t the enemy. That would be too easy, and also unfair to words like hooey, which has done nothing wrong except wear its pants a little higher than fashion currently recommends.
The real problem is language that doesn’t know what it is anymore.
There’s a difference between a brand using an old word on purpose and a brand using a tired word because nobody in the room flinched. One has character. The other has carpet. You can feel the difference almost immediately, even if you can’t explain it. Intentional language has a pulse. Accidental language has been approved.
That’s why chasing freshness can get brands into trouble, too. A brand hears that its language feels stale, panics, and suddenly everyone is trying to sound like they were raised by TikTok, cold brew, and mild contempt for punctuation. That’s not better. That’s just a different kind of embarrassment.
Fresh language doesn’t mean young language. It doesn’t mean slang. It doesn’t mean leaning so hard into the moment that six months later the whole thing smells like an abandoned meme. Fresh language means awake language.
It means someone heard the words before sending them out into the world. Someone asked whether they still carried weight, whether they belonged to this brand specifically, whether they sounded like a person with blood pressure and a childhood had actually chosen them.
That’s the standard. Not trendy. Not polished into a coma. Chosen.
A brand can say something plainly and still sound alive. It can use an old word and feel fresh because the word is doing real work. It can even use a familiar word if the sentence around it gives the word back some of its life.
But when a brand uses language because it sounds like the kind of language brands use, the game is already lost. That’s when you get a voice that feels technically correct and spiritually vacant, like a lobby plant made of plastic trying to comfort a grieving widow.
Stale language usually comes from safe rooms
A lot of stale brand language isn’t written as much as survived.
It survives the meeting. It survives the revision. It survives the person who wants more warmth, the person who wants more edge, and the person who says “premium” while touching their own chin. By the time the sentence gets approved, it has lost whatever little animal was once moving around inside it.
This is why so many brands end up sounding careful in the exact same way. Not because the writers had no ideas. Not because the strategy was empty. Often, the thinking was there. The problem is that every interesting word had to stand trial before a nervous committee, and by the end, the only language left was language nobody could object to.
Which is not the same as language anyone will remember.
Safe language has a very particular smell. It says something without risking much. It gestures toward feeling without actually feeling anything. It wants to be clear, but mostly it wants to be liked by everyone in the room before it ever meets the people it was supposedly written for.
That’s how brands get trapped in words like trusted, simple, powerful, modern, meaningful, and human. Not because those words are forbidden. Words are not forbidden. I’m not running a little prison for adjectives. But if a word could belong to almost any brand in the category, and nobody has to earn it, prove it, or make it strange in some specific way, then it’s probably just furniture.
And furniture is useful.
But you don’t tell people about the chair unless somebody broke it over Dave.
Fresh does not mean young
This is the part where brands sometimes panic and sprint directly into a rake.
They hear that their voice feels dated, so they assume the answer is to sound younger. Suddenly, the brand that sells enterprise compliance software wants to get a little cheeky. The regional bank wants to be a bestie. The medical device company starts writing headlines that feel like they were assembled from TikTok comments and a minor head injury.
This is how you get language that doesn’t sound fresh. It sounds like someone’s dad saying “no cap” at a wedding.
Fresh language is not about age. It’s about attention.
That’s why hooey can feel more alive than innovative. Hooey knows what it is. It has a little dust on it, but the dust is part of the furniture. Innovative, on the other hand, has been standing in the lobby of every company in America for twenty years, smiling at people who don’t want to talk to it.
The goal is not to chase the newest words. The goal is to hear your words clearly enough to know what they’re carrying. Some words carry charm. Some carry fatigue. Some carry a faint smell of a breakout session where everyone was given the same marker and told to dream big.
A brand voice should not be young for the sake of seeming young. It should be alert. Specific. Capable of noticing when a word has gone flat in its hand.
That’s the difference between language that belongs to the moment and language that is just wearing the moment’s hat.
Listen for the words that have stopped working
The work, then, is not to run around replacing every familiar word with some shiny little substitute wearing sunglasses indoors.
The work is to listen for the words the brand has stopped hearing.
Every brand has them. The phrases that show up in every deck. The claims that feel right because they’ve been repeated so often no one remembers who first said them. The sentences that move through approval easily because they don’t create friction, which is usually the first sign they may not create much feeling either.
This is where voice work gets useful. Not as decoration. Not as a final coat of verbal shellac after the “real” strategy is done. Voice work is part of the strategy because language is where the strategy either becomes human or puts on a fleece vest and joins a panel.
You have to ask what the words are carrying. You have to ask whether they still belong to you. You have to ask whether a customer would remember them five seconds after reading them, or whether they would pass through the mind like a beige sedan in light rain.
That does not mean every sentence needs to perform a little tap dance. Please no. Some language should be quiet. Some language should be plain. Some language should simply get out of the way and let the point arrive without wearing a cape.
But even plain language has to be alive.
It has to feel chosen. It has to feel heard. It has to sound like somebody looked at the available words, considered the usual suspects, and said, “No, not that one. That one’s been through enough.”
The Takeaway
Language dates a brand when the brand stops hearing itself clearly.
Not when it uses an old word. Not when it refuses to chase whatever phrase is currently sprinting around the internet in tiny shorts. A brand gets dated when it keeps reaching for words that once felt useful and now arrive exhausted, overhandled, and politely dead behind the eyes.
That’s why voice work matters. It helps a brand hear itself again. It catches the words that have gone flat, the claims that could belong to anyone, and the sentences everyone approved because nobody could feel them enough to object.
At ThoughtLab, this is part of the work. Not making brands sound younger. Not dressing them up in trendier language and sending them into the world like a nervous uncle at a foam party. The work is finding language that still has blood in it. Language with intention. Language that knows what it is doing there. A brand doesn’t need to sound young. It needs to sound awake.
