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" My job is to analyze conversations and discover why communications fail. "
Deborah Tannen
Discover
Why
Fail
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" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
Desire
You
People
" Maybe we're kind of predisposed to think that anything a politician does is calculated and therefore suspect. "
Deborah Tannen
Anything
Think
Politician
" The Pavlovian view of women voters - 'plug the words in, and they will respond' - sends a chill down my spine because it sounds like an adaptation of something I have written about communication between the sexes: When a woman tells a man about a problem, she doesn't want him to fix it; she just wants him to listen and let her know he understands. "
Deborah Tannen
Man
Woman
Women
" People vary. You change your style, your hair, and the way you dress. Talking differently will be a part of that. "
Deborah Tannen
People
Hair
Dress
" Everything you say in a family carries meaning from all that was said before. So with friends, there is less likelihood of a few words triggering associations from childhood, where our deepest emotions often are rooted. "
Deborah Tannen
Family
Childhood
You
" 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
" This idea that we should be best friends with our partner of the opposite gender leads toward tremendous frustration. Did you ever notice that while men often refer to their wives as best friends, women usually refer to another woman in that way? "
Deborah Tannen
Frustration
Men
Best
" I think it is important to remember that there are so many different ways to be sisters. "
Deborah Tannen
Remember
Think
Different
" It's a particularly modern myth that married people are best friends. The best-friend concept is a uniquely female phenomena. "
Deborah Tannen
Best
Modern
Myth
" There's the bond of a connection and the bond of bondage... When you are connected to somebody, everything each one does affects the other, and it's a kind of bondage. You're not as free as you would be if that person wasn't in your life. "
Deborah Tannen
You
Life
Bond
" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
Talking
Understanding
Writing
" 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
" For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships. "
Deborah Tannen
Language
Connections
Most
" There is probably no such thing as a level playing field in political campaigns. "
Deborah Tannen
Field
Level
Political
" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
Women
Men
Independence
" 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
More
Work
Men
" 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'? "
Deborah Tannen
Positive
She
Ethics
" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
My Life
Life
New York
" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
Now
Great
Conversation
" I was one of those daughters who saw my mother as my enemy when I was a teen. "
Deborah Tannen
Saw
Who
Mother
" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
Better
Work
Women
" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
Life
Women
Best
" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
Government
Meaning
Death
" Our ways of relating to each other become like habits. "
Deborah Tannen
Our
Ways
Like
" Mothers and daughters find in each other the source of great comfort but also of great pain. We talk to each other in better and worse ways than we talk to anyone else. "
Deborah Tannen
Comfort
Pain
Better
" For girls and women, talk is the glue that holds a relationship together - and the explosive that can blow it apart. That's why you can think you're having a perfectly amiable chat, then suddenly find yourself wounded by the shrapnel from an exploded conversation. "
Deborah Tannen
Together
Women
Yourself
" I wouldn't say that it's hard for sisters to treat each other with respect. Many do. "
Deborah Tannen
Treat
Hard
Respect
" Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women. "
Deborah Tannen
Women
Talk
Relationships
" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
Alone
World
Survive
" When evidence emerged that Clinton was a devoted mother, Margaret Carlson writing in 'TIME' found her guilty of 'yuppie overdoting on her daughter.' "
Deborah Tannen
Guilty
Mother
Time