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" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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
" A sister is like yourself in a different movie, a movie that stars you in a different life. "
Deborah Tannen
Sister
Life
Stars
" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
Children
Writing
Women
" 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
" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
You
Woman
Talking
" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
California
Know
People
" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
Meaning
Say
Serious
" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
Young
Back
Wife
" 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
" Each underestimates her own power and overestimates the other's. "
Deborah Tannen
Other
Power
Own
" Our spirits are corroded by living in an atmosphere of unrelenting contention - an argument culture. "
Deborah Tannen
Culture
Argument
Atmosphere
" My mother cared a lot about clothes. It was a point of friction because when I was a teenager, and I only wanted to wear my father's shirts, and I never wanted to wear makeup, she would say: 'Put on lipstick.' That was her thing. "
Deborah Tannen
Makeup
Father
Clothes
" The culture of critique undermines the spirit not only of people in public roles but of those who read about them, afraid to believe in anyone or anything because the next story... will tell them why they shouldn't. "
Deborah Tannen
Spirit
Believe
Culture
" 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
" 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
" 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
" One of the nice things about the United States is that, wherever you go, people speak the same language. So native New Yorkers can move to San Francisco, Houston, or Milwaukee and still understand and be understood by everyone they meet. Right? Well, not exactly. Or, as a native New Yorker might put it, 'Wrong!' "
Deborah Tannen
You
Speak
People
" 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
More
" 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
" The effect of dominance is not always the result of an intention to dominate. "
Deborah Tannen
Always
Dominate
Result
" The word 'sister' evokes an ideal of connection and support, like the friendships that made Rebecca Wells's 'Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood' and Ann Brashares's 'The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants' into best-selling novels and successful films. "
Deborah Tannen
Support
Sister
Successful
" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
Who
Believe
Differences
" 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
" The contrasting focus on connection versus hierarchy also sheds light on innumerable adult conversations - and frustrations. Say a woman tells another about a personal problem and hears in response, 'I know how you feel' or 'the same thing happens to me.' The resulting 'troubles talk' reinforces the connection between them. "
Deborah Tannen
Woman
Focus
Know
" The trickiest thing about the double bind is that it operates imperceptibly, like shots from a gun with a silencer. "
Deborah Tannen
Like
Shots
Bind
" 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
" A sister is someone who owns part of what you own: a house, perhaps, or a less tangible legacy, like memories of your childhood and the experience of your family. "
Deborah Tannen
Family
Experience
Memories
" 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
" Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations. "
Deborah Tannen
Lived
Person
Life
" 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. "
Deborah Tannen
Sister
Me
Relationships