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" American popular culture, like individuals in daily life, tends to either romanticize or demonize mothers. We ricochet between 'Everything I ever accomplished I owe to my mother' and 'Every problem I have in my life is my mother's fault.' "

Deborah Tannen

Daily

Mother

Life

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" If you talk to your friends the way your parents talk, they will think you are stiff and odd. "

" If you understand gender differences in what I call 'conversational style', you may not be able to prevent disagreements from arising, but you stand a better chance of preventing them from spiraling out of control. "

" It's a particularly modern myth that married people are best friends. The best-friend concept is a uniquely female phenomena. "

" I think of myself as a writer as much as I think of myself as a linguist and an academic. I really enjoy writing - playing with language and getting just the right metaphor. "

" The death of compromise has become a threat to our nation as we confront crucial issues such as the debt ceiling and that most basic of legislative responsibilities: a federal budget. At stake is the very meaning of what had once seemed unshakable: 'the full faith and credit' of the U.S. government. "

" One of the first studies in the field of gender and language, by Don H. Zimmerman and Candace West in 1975, found that in casual conversations between women and men, women were interrupted far more often. "

" Birth order is fascinating, and it is forever. "

" If women talk in ways expected of them or project a feminine demeanor, it's seen as weak. But if they talk in ways associated with men or bosses, then they're seen as too aggressive. Whatever they do violates one or the other expectation: either you're not talking as you should as a woman or as boss. "

" We tend to assume that we have a baseline of speech that's going to be normal in all contexts, but the truth is, we all change our ways of speaking depending on who we're talking to. And so I think it's kind of a gesture of politeness to the people you're speaking to to try to say something in their own idiom. "

" I interviewed more than 100 women about their sisters, but if they also had brothers, I asked them to compare. Most said they talked to their sisters more often, at greater length and, yes, about more personal topics. This often meant that they felt closer to their sisters, but not always. "

Deborah Tannen

Said

Always

" We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has. "

" It might seem at first surprising that when I studied women and men talking at work, I found that women 'interrupted' each other more often than men did - when they were in all-women conversations. "

Deborah Tannen

Work

Men

" I am the youngest of three girls. My first linguistics book was a study of 'New York Jewish conversational style'. That was my dissertation. "

" New Yorkers seem to think the best thing two people can do is talk. "

" Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone. "

" Everything we say has metamessages indicating how our words are to be interpreted: Is this a serious statement or a joke? Does it show annoyance or goodwill? Most of the time, metamessages are communicated and interpreted without notice because, as far as anyone can tell, the speaker and the hearer agree on their meaning. "

" Our ways of relating to each other become like habits. "

Deborah Tannen

Our

Ways

" The double bind lowers its boom on women in positions of authority, so those who haven't yet risen to such positions have not yet felt its full weight. "

" When Clinton first appeared on the national stage back in 1992, the young wife of the Arkansas governor running for president, she kept her natural-brown hair off her face with a headband. "

" It's an interesting point about sisters not getting the same attention as parents and children, and even brothers. I suspect it's just because women didn't count that much and weren't the ones writing the accounts. "

" For women, detailed conversation is our lifeblood, while for men it's just not as critical. "

" In this world, conversations are negotiations for closeness in which people try to seek and give confirmation and support, and to reach consensus. They try to protect themselves from others' attempts to push them away. "

" Much of my work over the years has developed the premise that women's styles of friendship and conversation aren't inherently better than men's, simply different. "

" The dynamic of fathers and sons seems to be more around competition regarding things such as knowledge, accomplishments, expertise. "

Deborah Tannen

Competition

Things

" I wouldn't say that it's hard for sisters to treat each other with respect. Many do. "

" Many mothers and daughters are as close as any two people can be, but closeness always carries with it the need - indeed, the desire - to consider how your actions will affect the other person, and this can make you feel that you are no longer in control of your own life. "

" My writing is about connecting ways of talking to human relationships. My purpose is to show that linguistics has something to offer in understanding and improving relationships. "

" Where the daughter sees power, the mother feels powerless. Daughters and mothers, I found, both overestimate the other's power - and underestimate their own. "

" In a world of status, independence is key, because a primary means of establishing status is to tell others what to do, and taking orders is a marker of low status. Though all humans need both intimacy and independence, women tend to focus on the first and men on the second. It is as if their lifeblood ran in different directions. "

" It is easy to understand why conflict is so often highlighted: Writers of headlines or promotional copy want to catch attention and attract an audience. They are usually under time pressure, which lures them to established, conventionalized ways of expressing ideas in the absence of leisure to think up entirely new ones. "