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" Each underestimates her own power and overestimates the other's. "
Deborah Tannen
Other
Power
Own
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" I can't tell you how many times I heard from younger sisters that their older sisters were bossy and judgmental. "
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" The effect of dominance is not always the result of an intention to dominate. "
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" When did the word 'compromise' get compromised? When did the negative connotations of 'He was caught in a compromising position' or 'She compromised her ethics' replace the positive connotations of 'They reached a compromise'? "
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" There is more excitement, more amazement when a first is born. No subsequent babies can have that impact. "
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" Where the daughter sees power, the mother feels powerless. Daughters and mothers, I found, both overestimate the other's power - and underestimate their own. "
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" 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. "
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" For each other, at each other: Sisters can be either or both. The same could be said of people in any close relationship. Yet there is something special about sisters - specially gratifying and specially fraught. "
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" Birth order is fascinating, and it is forever. "
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" I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. For part of my life, I was living in Detroit, and I remember a friend of mine commenting she could always tell when I had been speaking to my mother because my New York accent had come back. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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Weight
Who
Women
" There are those who believe that the existence of gender differences at very early ages is evidence that these differences are biological or generic in origin. "
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Believe
Differences
" Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations. "
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Lived
Person
Life
" Our spirits are corroded by living in an atmosphere of unrelenting contention - an argument culture. "
Deborah Tannen
Culture
Argument
Atmosphere
" For many women, and a fair number of men, saying 'I'm sorry' isn't literally an apology; it's a ritual way of restoring balance to a conversation. "
Deborah Tannen
Balance
Women
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" The long history of conversations that family members share contributes not only to how listeners interpret words but also to how speakers choose them. "
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History
Long
Words
" There is probably no such thing as a level playing field in political campaigns. "
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Field
Level
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" Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women. "
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" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
Women
Casual
Gender
" I am the youngest of three girls. My first linguistics book was a study of 'New York Jewish conversational style'. That was my dissertation. "
Deborah Tannen
New
Three
Style
" 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. "
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" 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. "
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Women
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" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
Try
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" An assumption underlying almost all comments on interruptions is that they are aggressive, but the line between what's perceived as assertiveness or aggressiveness almost certainly shifts with an interrupter's gender. "
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Line
Gender
Shifts
" Mothers subject their daughters to a level of scrutiny people usually reserve for themselves. A mother's gaze is like a magnifying glass held between the sun's rays and kindling. It concentrates the rays of imperfection on her daughter's yearning for approval. The result can be a conflagration - whoosh. "
Deborah Tannen
Result
Daughter
Mother
" Most non-New Yorkers, finding themselves within hearing range of strangers' conversation, think it's nice to pretend they didn't hear. But many New Yorkers think it's nice to toss in a relevant comment. "
Deborah Tannen
Think
Conversation
Nice
" In the past, great communicators were great orators, but great communicators today sound conversational, and interrupting is common in conversation. And public discourse is now more about entertainment than enlightenment. "
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" Back when the powerful 19th-century senator Henry Clay was called 'the great compromiser,' achieving a compromise really was considered great. "
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Powerful
Achieving
Compromise
" 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. "
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More
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" My interest in the linguistic differences between women and men grew from research I conducted early in my career on conversations between speakers of different ethnic and regional backgrounds. "
Deborah Tannen
Men
Early
Differences