Wordslut

by Amanda Montell

  The other thing this people vs. ideas concept does is contribute to the myth that when women speak to one another, it’s “gossip”—which is idle and petty—whereas men’s talk is “banter,” which is more sophisticated and never stoops to discussing people who aren’t in the room. In 2011 language scholar John L. Locke wrote a book called Duels and Duets: Why Men and Women Talk So Differently, in which he said, “If [men] have something to say to a foe or competitor, they usually go up to him and say it.”

  Like Otto Jespersen, Locke had no data to back up this statement. What there is plenty of data to support, however, is the fact that gossip is a serviceable and goal-driven practice. Our linguist Deborah Cameron has explained that when you analyze it closely, gossip serves three main purposes: 1) to circulate personal information in order to keep members of a social group in the know; 2) to bond with one another by establishing the gossipers as an in-group; and 3) to affirm the group’s commitment to certain values or norms.

  This kind of talk is absolutely not a women-only pursuit. English-language corpuses offer endless cases of man-on-man gossip. Perhaps the most famous example comes from a conversation most should remember: the recording of Donald Trump and former Access Hollywood host Billy Bush talking behind the back of television personality Nancy O’Dell in 2005. I want to point out something important about the linguistic dynamics of this exchange that a lot of political commentators missed. As if I need to remind you, here’s the transcript:

  DONALD TRUMP: I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.

  BILLY BUSH: Sheesh, your girl’s hot as shit. In the purple. . . .

  TRUMP: Yeah, that’s her. With the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

  BUSH: Whatever you want.

  TRUMP: Grab ’em by the pussy.

  BUSH: [laughs]

  TRUMP: You can do anything.

  Back when this tape was released in 2016, everyone from DC to the mainstream media labeled Trump’s statements as “lewd commentary” and grotesque “sex boasts”—but those aren’t actually the most accurate descriptions of what he’s doing. Look closely and you’ll see that Trump isn’t boasting; he starts by talking about a time he failed to seduce a woman. Trump labeled his speech “locker-room banter,” which a lot of people took issue with, but it’s technically a more spot-on categorization of what he’s doing.

  “Locker-room banter” is just a manlier-sounding synonym for gossip; it’s the act of talking about someone who’s not in the room with the intention of establishing camaraderie and in-group norms, just as Deborah Cameron described. This is done by positioning the absent subject of conversation as an outsider and by using embarrassing personal stories and crude language as a currency of trust. Trump starts his exchange not with a boast but with the admission of an unflattering story about a time he wasn’t able to convince a woman to have sex with him. He goes on to criticize the woman’s appearance (her “big phony tits”) and moves on to his “grab ’em by the pussy” line, after which Billy Bush cracks up laughing. Lewd and misogynist as this language is, the main purpose it serves is as a bonding ritual. As Cameron puts it, “Like the sharing of secrets, the sharing of transgressive (or offensive) words like this is a token of intimacy. . . . It says, ‘I am showing that I trust you by saying things, and using words, that I wouldn’t want the whole world to hear.’” And it’s an invitation for the listener to reciprocate. When Trump tells the story about his unsuccessful attempt to have sex with a married woman, the vulnerable confession communicates to Billy Bush that they’re buddies who can rely on one another not to tell. Analytically speaking, Trump is gossiping. At some point or another, all men do (though the content is not always this wholly despicable). It’s simply that the word gossip* and its trivial implications have been pegged a feminine thing.

  Still, modern linguists agree that woman-to-woman conversation is distinct from man-to-man conversation in a few key ways. In 2004 Jennifer Coates wrote a book called Women, Men, and Language, in which she describes a number of tacit techniques observed in all-women exchanges that, to contradict Otto Jespersen, actually strike me as linguistically quite “genius” when you look under the surface.

  In her book, Coates busts a slew of commonly believed myths about a verbal tactic called hedging. When linguists talk about hedges, they’re referring to “filler” phrases like just, you know, well, so, I mean, and I feel like. Tiny as these sound bites are, they’re controversial. One of the first modern-language experts to formally censure them was UC Berkeley scholar Robin Lakoff. Back in the 1970s, Lakoff attributed the use of hedges to a sense of hesitancy and lack of confidence. Her idea was that just as society teaches women to express doubt of their physical attractiveness, “a woman has traditionally gained reassurance in this culture from presenting herself . . . as unsure of the correctness of what she’s saying.” Believing a hesitant style of speech will earn them acceptance, women, says Lakoff, will adopt deferential phrases like just and you know to dilute the conviction of their statements (e.g., “I just feel like maybe we should push the deadline to Friday, you know?”).

  Lakoff’s issue with women succumbing to this expectation was that inserting too many justs or you knows in order to come off as sweet and self-doubting won’t help women’s overall station in society; instead, it will reinforce the stereotype that women are naturally docile and insecure. As a result, they should stop themselves from using these phrases at every turn. If you’re a woman, you might have heard a teacher or parent offer similar criticisms at some point in an attempt to help you sound more “authoritative” and “self-confident” for a job interview or presentation.

  But linguists have found that there are actually several different types of hedges and don’t all serve the same purpose. Men also hedge overall about as frequently as women do, and women hedge to communicate insecurity far less than people assume (all of which we’ll get into more in the next chapter). People confuse women’s use of certain softening hedges like just, I mean, and I feel like as signs of uncertainty, but research shows that these words accomplish something different: instead, they’re used to help create trust and empathy in a conversation. As Coates explains, hedges like these “are used to respect the face needs of all participants, to negotiate sensitive topics, and to encourage the participation of others.”

  These interpersonal tools are especially handy for women, who almost always dive into sensitive territory at some point during their discussions. Coates collected some enlightening data on how women hedge with one another from a group discussion among female friends about Britain’s notorious Yorkshire Ripper case of the early 1980s. The speakers were recalling how, during the hunt for the perpetrator, the police asked the public to consider their family members as suspects. At one point, a woman named Sally revealed that she once thought for a second that the killer might have been her husband. The hedges in her statement are underlined:

  “Oh god yes well I mean we were living in Yorkshire at the time and I—I mean I. I mean I did/ I sort of thought well could it be John?”

  These hedges here are not representative of Sally’s indecision—she isn’t hedging or breaking off her sentences due to, as Otto Jespersen said, “talking without having thought out what [she is] going to say.” Sally knows exactly what she wants to get across. But because the topic at hand is so sensitive, she needs the wells and I means so she doesn’t come off as brusque and unfeeling. “Self-disclosure of this kind can be extremely face-threatening,” Coates explains. “Speakers need to hedge their statements.”

  This is true in so many situations. For instance, saying something along the lines of, “I mean, I just feel lik
e you should maybe, well, try seeing a therapist” is a gentler, easier-to-hear way of saying, “You should see a therapist.” The latter statement, though direct, could come across as cold in the context of a heart-to-heart conversation. The hedged version is more tactful and open, inviting of the listener’s point of view, and leaves space for them to interject or share a different perspective (unlike “You should see a therapist,” which is closed off and doesn’t make room for anyone else’s input).

  Journalist Ann Friedman has written at length about the hate mail she has received for her perceived overuse of hedges on her podcast Call Your Girlfriend, a conversational show she cohosts with her best friend, entrepreneur Aminatou Sow. “Fingernails on a chalkboard” is among the descriptions iTunes reviewers have used to condemn them. In 2015 Friedman defended her language in a piece for The Cut that gets to the heart of what linguists know about hedges but that some of Friedman’s critics seem to have missed: “Language is not always about making an argument or conveying information in the cleanest, simplest way possible. It’s often about building relationships. It’s about making yourself understood and trying to understand someone else.”

  Women’s underappreciated prowess in conversation doesn’t end with hedges. There are also what linguists call minimal responses, which refers to those little phrases like yeah, right, and mm-hmm that one utters while someone else is speaking to demonstrate what Coates terms “active listenership.”

  In 1995 New Zealand sociolinguist Janet Holmes published a book called Women, Men and Politeness, and in it she quoted the following conversation, where two women named Tina and Lyn are talking about a teacher they like. As Tina speaks, watch for Lyn’s minimal responses:

  Well-placed interjections like Lyn’s—always at the end of a complete unit of meaning or during a pause—never commandeer the conversation or interrupt its flow. Instead, they work to affirm the speaker while signaling the listener’s recognition of how her story is progressing. They’re part of what make a conversation feel productive. All the mm-hmms and yeahs represent Lyn’s investment in the discourse and her support of its content. She’s an active participant, not simply a wall for Tina to talk at.

  These strategic little phrases, Coates says, “illustrate women’s sensitive use of minimal responses in talk . . . an achievement which demonstrates the work coparticipants do in predicting how talk will develop.” Sonja Lanehart, an African-American language scholar at the University of Texas in San Antonio, told me once that women speakers of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), a systematic dialect spoken in many black communities, are especially skilled at minimal responses. “If you’re sitting in a group of black women, there’s going to be a lot of cross talk—a lot of mm-hmm and girl, you’re right,” she said. “Black women’s speech is so much about consensus and community building.”

  Another tactic women use to establish conversational connections is a certain form of question-asking that is also misinterpreted as a sign of insecurity. By Lakoff’s—and most average English speakers’—measure, when women ask “too many” questions (and these include questions with declarative functions like, “Should we leave for dinner now?” as well as tag questions like “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”), it always comes from a place of timidity. But Jennifer Coates’s research has shown that in women-only spaces, questions (both the declarative and tag kinds) serve the handy, cooperative purposes of introducing new topics, checking the viewpoints of other speakers, and initiating stories. This could manifest itself as, for example, a group of women friends talking about their different experiences with a topic—concerts they’ve been to, let’s say. Everyone could be sharing a story about a time they saw a musician when one speaker targets another in the group and asks her, “Hey, girl, didn’t you see Rihanna last year?” or “What was that amazing show you went to with the mosh pit?”

  Coates has found that when men ask each other questions (which they do just as frequently as women, though they’re never accused of insecurity for it), it’s typically to request information and seek answers, but with women, questions serve a different function. Women’s intentions are to welcome each participant onto the conversational floor and keep the overall flow moving. The delicate horizontality of all-women discourse requires that no single participant position themselves as the dominant authority on the topic at hand, and the questions they use align with those requirements. “Women’s avoidance of information-seeking questions seems to be related to their role in constructing a speaker as ‘someone who knows the answer,’ an expert,” Coates explains. “In friendly conversation, women avoid the role of expert and therefore avoid forms which construct asymmetry.”

  Women’s conversations also have a distinctive turn-taking structure—a style of talk that Coates likens to a musical jam session. “The defining characteristic of a . . . jam session,” she says, “is that the conversational floor is potentially open to all participants simultaneously.” In such conversations, you might hear overlapping talk, speakers repeating one another, or rephrasing each other’s words. Everyone is working together to construct meaning, and thus the one-speaker-at-a-time rule does not apply. “Simultaneous speech does not threaten comprehension,” Coates explains, “but on the contrary permits a more multilayered development of topics.”

  This jam session structure is something you rarely find in exchanges among men. In fact, Coates has found that one of the most defining characteristics of men’s conversations, one that helps maintain its hierarchical structure, is that they tend to happen in alternating monologues, or stretches of talk where one speaker holds the floor for a lengthy period of time without any interruptions, not even in the form of minimal responses. This is a way for a speaker to “play the expert,” or display their individual knowledge of a subject. “Because most men most of the time choose a one-at-a-time model of turn-taking, overlap is interpreted as deviant, as an (illegitimate) attempt to grab the floor,” Coates explains. For this reason, men sometimes interpret women’s jam session–style overlaps as rude intrusions. In 1992 language scholar Mary Talbot recorded a double date between two heterosexual couples, during which one of the men was telling a story about an airport experience as his partner intermittently chimed in with collaborative comments and support. At a point, the dude finally threw his hands up and said, “I wish you’d stop interrupting me!” If only he’d been a connoisseur of jazz.

  Glance at the transcript of almost any all-women conversation and you’ll immediately discover what a jam session looks like. For instance, look at the conversation below collected by Jennifer Coates, where she and four other speakers are discussing how apes communicate with language.

  This (deliciously nerdy) exchange depicts so many elements of the jam session–esque banter Coates described. Meg, Mary, Bea, and Helen offer minimal responses like yeah, mm-hmm, and that’s right to affirm the other speakers and push the discussion forward. We’ve got Mary and Bea rephrasing one another, finishing each other’s sentences, and talking in unison as they discuss how apes refer to a “Brazil nut.” Among the many eyeroll-inducing claims he made in Language, Otto Jespersen wrote, “the science of language has very few votaries among women.” Clearly, he just wasn’t paying attention. Luckily, Jennifer Coates was.

  As for why women tend to talk to one another in this collaborative style: Scholars have posed a few theories. One of the silliest comes from that John L. Locke character, who once suggested that women naturally evolved to converse more horizontally, like giraffes evolved to have long necks. His argument is that women’s affinities for talking about people behind their backs and babbling over one another in conversation are a product of our ancestors’ confinement to domestic spaces—the kitchen, the crafts table—where women were ingrained to develop feelings of closeness through intimate admissions about themselves and other people. So in the kitchens and at the crafts table they shall stay. Locke also argued that men’s competitive speech style arose because they were “selected to agg
ress and dominate, but could end up killing themselves, [so] they needed a safer way of achieving their goals.” Thus, men opted for ritualized verbal duels involving words instead of weapons. These confrontations always produced a winner and a loser, and long after dueling traditions ended, men still continue to talk this way. Or so Locke’s story goes.

  There are less specious explanations for these gendered language differences. One stems from the arguments made by linguist Deborah Tannen in her 1990 best-selling book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. In her book, Tannen claims that from early childhood, women and men are socialized to live in two opposing cultures with two opposing sets of values, so they grow up to understand things differently. Not better or worse, just different. As a result, men’s goals when they talk are to communicate information, while women’s are to form connections.

  Another, more complex theory suggests that women’s conversational style has developed as a coping strategy that reflects their position in our culture. This argument is inspired by Janet Holmes, who suggests that our society requires women to be the emotional laborers—shoulders to cry on, carriers of sympathetic burdens. So when women get together and talk to each other in a horizontal style, you’re basically looking at a bunch of people all navigating those expectations at the same time, doing a damn good job of it, and enjoying the reciprocation. I think it’s safe to say any woman who’s ever experienced the genuine empathy and solidarity of another woman knows it’s a pretty satisfying feeling.

  Now, whether or not women are born more empathetic is hard to tell. But experts doubt it. In 2017 gender sociologist Lisa Huebner told Harper’s Bazaar that we should reject the notion that women are “always, naturally and biologically able to feel, express, and manage our emotions better than men”—and thus should be responsible for doing so. Of course, some people are able to handle emotions better than others because of their individual personalities. But as Huebner says, “I would argue that we still have no firm evidence that this ability is biologically determined.”