Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I've long believed that if you understand how conversational styles work, you can make adjustments in conversations to get what you want in your relationships. "

Related Quotes:

" I would say 'woman' used to be a noun, and now it is a noun and also an adjective. And words change their functions in that way. It's one of the most common phenomena about words. They start as one thing, and they end up as something else. "

Deborah Tannen

Start

Woman

Words

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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'? "

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

" 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. "

" The meanings of words and the uses of words come from practice from the way people in a given culture use those words. "

" 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. "

" The trickiest thing about the double bind is that it operates imperceptibly, like shots from a gun with a silencer. "

Deborah Tannen

Shots

Bind

" 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

" The long history of conversations that family members share contributes not only to how listeners interpret words but also to how speakers choose them. "

" Our spirits are corroded by living in an atmosphere of unrelenting contention - an argument culture. "

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

" When evidence emerged that Clinton was a devoted mother, Margaret Carlson writing in 'TIME' found her guilty of 'yuppie overdoting on her daughter.' "

" 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. "

" We all feel wistfulness or regret about roads not taken. "

" While the requirements of a good leader and a good man are similar, the requirements of a good leader and a good woman are mutually exclusive. A good leader must be tough, but a good woman must not be. A good woman must be self-deprecating, but a good leader must not be. "

" 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. "

" All of us aspire to be powerful, and we all want to connect with others. "

Deborah Tannen

Powerful

Want

" Now I am married to a man who is a partner and friend. We come from similar backgrounds and share values and interests. It is a continual source of pleasure to talk to him. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Conflict can't be avoided in our public lives any more than we can avoid conflict with people we love. One of the great strengths of our society is that we can express these conflicts openly. "

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

Deborah Tannen

Competition

Things

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I can't tell you how many times I heard from younger sisters that their older sisters were bossy and judgmental. "

" 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. "

" 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. "