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

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" As a sociolinguist, I want to know how cultural differences affect the ways people talk and listen. My research method, inspired by the work of Robin Lakoff and John Gumperz of the University of California at Berkeley, is sociolinguistic microanalysis. I tape-record and transcribe naturally occurring conversations. "

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

" I have two sisters; one is two years older, and one is eight years older. That helped me understand how completely different sister relationships can be. "

" In some ways, siblings, and especially sisters, are more influential in your childhood than your parents. "

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

" 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. "

" People vary. You change your style, your hair, and the way you dress. Talking differently will be a part of that. "

" Back when the powerful 19th-century senator Henry Clay was called 'the great compromiser,' achieving a compromise really was considered great. "

" 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. "

" Maybe we're kind of predisposed to think that anything a politician does is calculated and therefore suspect. "

" The effect of dominance is not always the result of an intention to dominate. "

" 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. "

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

" A sister is like yourself in a different movie, a movie that stars you in a different life. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There is probably no such thing as a level playing field in political campaigns. "

" 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. "

" When women told me they'd always wished they had a sister, they were thinking of this ideal of mutual encouragement and support. Many of those who have sisters also yearn for this ideal because their relationships with their sisters don't always live up to it. "

" 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'? "

" Sister relationships span a huge range, from best friends to worst enemies. From 'I adore her; I talk to her five times a day' to 'I decided to cut her out of my life.' For most women, it's in between. "

" 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 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. "

" I believe the switch from 'lady' to 'woman' was part of the women's movement. 'Lady' was a euphemism for 'woman,' and that was one reason that we wanted to move away from it. "

" 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. "

" Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women. "

" Conflict and opposition are as necessary as cooperation and agreement, but the scale is off balance, with conflict and opposition overweighted. "

" 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. "

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

" Why don't men like to stop and ask directions? This question, which I first addressed in my 1990 book 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation', garnered perhaps the most attention of any issue or insight in that book. "