Deborah Tannen Quotes
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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.
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I can't tell you how many times I heard from younger sisters that their older sisters were bossy and judgmental.
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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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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.
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A double bind is far worse than a straightforward damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't dilemma. It requires you to obey two mutually exclusive commands: Anything you do to fulfill one violates the other.
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The study of gender and language might seem at first to be a narrowly focused field, but it is actually as interdisciplinary as they come.
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When daughters react with annoyance or even anger at the smallest, seemingly innocent remarks, mothers get the feeling that talking to their daughters can be like walking on eggshells: they have to watch every word.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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For many women, and a fair number of men, saying 'I'm sorry' isn't literally an apology; it's a ritual way of restoring balance to a conversation.
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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.
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Many mothers or daughters assume that words only mean one thing. 'If I feel criticised, that has to be the whole story', and 'if I feel I am being helpful, that has to be the whole story'.
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Asian cultures... place great value on avoiding open expression of disagreement and conflict because they emphasize harmony.
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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.
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A sister is like yourself in a different movie, a movie that stars you in a different life.
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I was one of those daughters who saw my mother as my enemy when I was a teen.
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The trickiest thing about the double bind is that it operates imperceptibly, like shots from a gun with a silencer.
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I'm a linguist. I study how people talk to each other and how the ways we talk affect our relationships.
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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.
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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.
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Where the daughter sees power, the mother feels powerless. Daughters and mothers, I found, both overestimate the other's power - and underestimate their own.
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Our spirits are corroded by living in an atmosphere of unrelenting contention - an argument culture.