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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.
Deborah Tannen -
We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.
Deborah Tannen
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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 -
The dynamic of fathers and sons seems to be more around competition regarding things such as knowledge, accomplishments, expertise.
Deborah Tannen -
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.
Deborah Tannen -
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 -
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 -
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
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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 -
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 -
We all feel wistfulness or regret about roads not taken.
Deborah Tannen -
'Right' and 'wrong' aren't words a linguist uses.
Deborah Tannen -
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 -
For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.
Deborah Tannen
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The meanings of words and the uses of words come from practice from the way people in a given culture use those words.
Deborah Tannen -
Conflict and opposition are as necessary as cooperation and agreement, but the scale is off balance, with conflict and opposition overweighted.
Deborah Tannen -
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 -
Maybe we're kind of predisposed to think that anything a politician does is calculated and therefore suspect.
Deborah Tannen -
Each underestimates her own power and overestimates the other's.
Deborah Tannen -
The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation - or a relationship.
Deborah Tannen
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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 -
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 -
Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women.
Deborah Tannen -
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.
Deborah Tannen