{"id":844,"date":"2008-08-11T05:00:48","date_gmt":"2008-08-11T13:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/?p=844"},"modified":"2008-08-13T10:13:49","modified_gmt":"2008-08-13T18:13:49","slug":"language-differences-between-men-and-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/language\/language-differences-between-men-and-women\/","title":{"rendered":"Language differences between men and women"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone\" title=\"man and woman talking\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog-images-08\/talking.jpg\" alt=\"man and woman talking\" width=\"435\" height=\"291\" \/><\/p>\n<p>According to the dust jacket of <em>The Female Brain<\/em> by Louann Brizendine, published by Morgan Road Books in 2006, the book explains why<\/p>\n<ul>\n<blockquote>\n<li> A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000<\/li>\n<li>A woman remembers fights that a man insists never happened<\/li>\n<li>A teen girl is so obsessed with her looks and talking on the phone<\/li>\n<li>Thoughts about sex enter a woman&#8217;s brain once every couple of days but enter a man&#8217;s brain about once every minute<\/li>\n<li>A woman knows what people are feeling, while a man can&#8217;t spot an emotion unless somebody cries or threatens bodily harm<\/li>\n<li>A woman over fifty is more likely to initiate divorce than a man<\/li>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But are these assertions in fact, well, factual? <!--more-->According to Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at UPenn, studies of telephone conversations actually show that men, on average, appear slightly <em>more<\/em> talkative than women. More significantly, the difference <em>between<\/em> the two groups is far less significant than variations <em>within<\/em> the two groups.<\/p>\n<p>According to Liberman, <em>The Female Brain<\/em> uses the form but not the substance of scientific writing to prop up assertions that are not actually supported by science. &#8220;There are 90 pages of end-notes and bibliography in support of 185 pages of text,&#8221; he says. &#8220;And yet in the cases that I checked, the cited references offered little or no support for the sweeping and controversial claims in the text.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Liberman&#8217;s objections are unlikely to get the media play that Brizendine&#8217;s book received. Broad assertions that reinforce (or even, sometimes, that challenge) stereotypes are fodder for lazy journalists &#8212; or for those with an axe to grind. He offers a succinct explanation of the mechanism:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>1. There&#8217;s a traditional belief X, with cultural, social and economic connections.<\/p>\n<p>2. Progressive social advocacy challenges X and undermines its associated social structures, while conservative social advocacy defends them.<\/p>\n<p>3. There are some new scientific results bearing on X.<\/p>\n<p>Everyone with an opinion about X and its social correlates now has an interest in spinning these results. If the results seem somewhat contrary to X, the anti-X faction will want to push the interpretation as far as possible to further discredit X. If the results seem somewhat supportive of X, the pro-X faction will want to push the interpretation as far as possible to bolster X and to discredit its challengers.<\/p>\n<p>This is a lot like what happens in a political campaign.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Have I been too gabby? (How like a man!)<\/p>\n<p>.<\/p>\n<p><em>Via <a title=\"language log\" href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=467\" target=\"_blank\">Language Log<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Image from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/moriza\/\">moriza&#8217;s photostream<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to the dust jacket of The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine, published by Morgan Road Books in 2006, the book explains why A woman uses about 20,000&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":865,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844\/revisions\/865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}