Addendum to SNJ (Who Talks More?)
07/19/2007
I've long been fascinated by la difference as an intellectual question (that is, as distinct from the emotional obsession with the opposite which kicked in around age thirteen). I think the interest began back in the early '70s, when radical feminists declared that there were no psychological differences between the sexes, except in those respects in which women were superior. It causes me to drive my wife crazy sometimes by expecting her to be able to explain everything every woman thinks or does. ("Why do y'all....?" "I don't know").
Anyway, looking around for further information on the question of which sex is more talkative, I found this NPR report on the same study discussed in my last journal. This paragraph near the end interests me:
In general, they found that women tend to talk more about relationships. Their everyday conversation is more studded with pronouns. Men tend to talk more about sports and gadgets, and their utterances include more numbers.
This supports what I was saying about the real difference being what each sex tends to find more interesting, but I was struck by the thing about pronouns. I realized some years ago that pronouns are a source of friction between me and my wife, making it difficult for us to work closely together on an everyday task like putting away dishes.
She: That one goes over there.
He: Which one?
She (impatiently): That one. Right there.
He: (exasperated): The yellow one?
She: Yes.
He: Where?
She (what is his problem?): There.
He (what is her problem?): On the second shelf beside the plates?
She: Yes! (implied: dammit)
He: (exit huffily)
I thought this was just us till I ran across C.S. Lewis's mention of it (can't remember which book--perhaps one of the space trilogy). But two women often seem able to communicate very smoothly in this way, as if there is some near-telepathic agreement about the antecedent of every pronoun.
And by the way, I think the chances are excellent that an accurate word count would find that I talk more than my wife on the average. She's fairly taciturn, and I'm either silent or loquacious, depending on who's around and what the topic is.
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