The article mostly talks about structural words. The real breakthrough is that they provide a lot of clues into our very being. We can predict lying, age, gender, and power using them. For those interested in this it would be worth checking out The Secret Life of Pronouns[1]
Your second paragraph talks about being able to notice these things in meetings. Penbrooke's research[1] shows that our brains ignore structural words. So it's pretty impossible to take advantage of this particular research.
However, I think there are a few things you can do.
1. You're first paragraph about "inside jokes" is spot on. When I was in college it was pretty common to to get what were called "Dorm Floor" shirts. The front had some slogan or name on them and the back had quotes from your dorm floor. When we went to create ours there were three of us who dominated the floor quotes. So they made a limit for how many quotes a person could have. Most of these quotes were essentially inside jokes.
If you want to know where you stand in a group it's pretty easy to test this using inside jokes. Can you start something? If they respect you they will pick up your inside joke.
2.When I was in college, I took a lot of discussion based classes related to political theory. I noticed my self picking up the mannerisms of a kid in my class. I then realized that others were too. This was a huge eye opening experience for me. I realized that mannerism and the way we speak is organic and if we can record it's evolution it tells us something about how power and society works.
The down side of this is that in a meeting you don't see the birth of the mannerism so you don't know who the decision makers are. You also can't mentally process the structural words, so I don't think there's much advantage there.
[1]http://secretlifeofpronouns.com/