Nobody warns you that hierarchy is a speech act.

Titles like "Senior," "Director," "Head of" — they don't describe competence. They perform it. Bourdieu called this symbolic capital: authority borrowed from a position, not earned through knowledge.

Foucault was blunter. Power doesn't flow to the most capable. It flows to whoever controls the discourse — who gets to speak, who gets heard, who defines what "expertise" even means inside a given institution.

The moment you realise a senior colleague has less grip on your field than you do, you're not experiencing imposter syndrome in reverse.

You're watching credentials cosplay as competence.

Speech communities don't promote the sharpest minds. They reproduce themselves. They elevate the voices that already sound like power — the register, the hedging, the confident vagueness that reads as gravitas.

Competence was never the currency.

Legitimacy was. And legitimacy, from the lens of linguistics, is just ideology that stopped announcing itself.