Tag: uptalk

Remembering Robin Lakoff

debuk

This month we learned that the linguist Robin Lakoff had died at the age of 82. If you’ve heard of Lakoff you will probably know her as the author of Language and Woman’s Place (LWP), an early and very influential contribution to the field of language and gender studies. It first appeared as an academic journal article in 1973 and went on to be published as a book two years later (readers of a certain vintage may remember the image on the cover, a headshot of a woman with a band-aid covering her mouth). Though Lakoff would write other books during a career that continued for much of the next half-century, she remained best known, and will probably be best remembered, for LWP. 

Like Dale Spender’s Man Made Language, which I wrote about following the announcement of Spender’s death in 2023, LWP is a text I had and still do have mixed feelings about—though in many ways these two classics, and their authors, could not have been more different.  Whereas Spender’s feminism was of the radical variety, Lakoff’s was more liberal; whereas Spender was decried by linguists for lacking academic credentials, Lakoff had a Ph.D in linguistics from Harvard, an academic position at the University of California Berkeley and a professional network that included many of the leading linguists of her generation. And whereas Spender embraced linguistic determinism (arguing that man-made language forced everyone to see the world through male/patriarchal eyes), Lakoff held more or less the opposite view: gendered and sexist patterns of language-use, in her opinion, were a reflection of social reality, “a clue that some external situation needs changing rather than items that one should seek to change directly”. She had little time for the 1970s feminist project of reforming sexist language: linguistic change, she maintained, follows (other kinds of) social change rather than vice-versa, and it will only happen if the society in question is already receptive.

When I first read LWP (which was not until the early 1980s: in 1973 I was only 14), that view was too conservative for my taste; today, in an era where some activists seem to believe that social justice goals can be achieved by simply making people and institutions use the “right” words, I think there’s something to be said for Lakoff’s caution on that score. In fact, there are a number of things about LWP which have aged better than I thought they would. But here I’m getting ahead of myself: the aim of this post isn’t (just) to catalogue my own points of agreement or disagreement with Lakoff. but to try to assess the contribution she made to both feminist and popular thinking about language and gender.

One place to start if you’re trying to assess a famous person’s legacy is with the obituaries and other tributes that appear after they die. Lakoff was sufficiently famous to get an obituary in the New York Times; the institution she spent most of her life working at, UC Berkeley, also posted a tribute, as did various websites read by professional linguists and/or amateur language enthusiasts.  And what many of these accounts put at the top of the list of her achievements was “founding”, “inspiring” or “launching” the academic study of language and gender. This did not entirely surprise me, since it was also said when she was still alive, but I admit that it did irritate me: in my view it is a considerable oversimplification of the field’s history.

Lakoff was, in the words of UC Berkeley’s tribute, a “pioneer” whose work helped to shape the field, but she was certainly not its sole originator: by the mid-1970s a lot was going on. Some other linguists (for instance Cornell professor Sally McConnell-Ginet, who would later write several now-classic articles as well as co-authoring a widely-used textbook) were teaching courses and presenting research at conferences; other work was being done not in linguistics but in disciplines like communication, English, anthropology, education, sociology and social psychology. There were also some serious writers on the subject (such as Casey Miller and Kate Swift, whose Words and Women first appeared in 1976) who were not academics but editors or lexicographers.

A selection of this early work appeared in a collection entitled Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance, edited by (sociologist) Barrie Thorne and (psychologist) Nancy Henley, which was published in the same year (1975) as the book version of LWP. This volume contains a number of classic pieces which inspired many later researchers and are still sometimes cited today, like Muriel Schulz’s “The semantic derogation of woman” and Don Zimmerman and Candace West’s article on interruptions. While many contributors referred to LWP, it’s clear that not everyone who read it at the time either shared Lakoff’s views or saw her approach as a model to emulate. Barrie Thorne, for instance, wrote quite a critical review for the women’s studies journal Signs. Then as now, there were disagreements—both intellectual and political—among feminists, and it does bother me when this perennial feature of our collective history gets airbrushed out of the record.   

Another feature of many tributes to Lakoff (one that’s also visible in other sources, such as her Wikipedia entry) was their selective presentation of the actual content of LWP. The book is divided into two main sections, one discussing the way women speak (it’s headed “Talking like a lady” and it introduces the concept of a distinctive “women’s language”) while the other, “Talking about women”, considers the ways in which the English language conventionally represents women as secondary to men—appendages, objects, different but not equal. In the book itself these two sections are presented as equally important: both are meant to contribute to the overall argument that linguistic patterns are a revealing source of evidence about the attitudes and social structures that subordinate women. But many summaries of LWP, including those that appeared in some of the tributes marking Lakoff’s death, focus entirely on the “women’s language” section.

The New York Times obituary, for example, devoted a fairly large proportion of its overall word-count to rehearsing the details of women’s language as laid out in LWP:

Dr Lakoff observed that women’s speech was marked by hedging phrases (“like”, “y’know”) which convey that the speaker is uncertain; empty adjectives like “adorable” and “lovely”, which trivialize statements; so-called tag questions at the end of sentences, which convey hesitancy; overly polite phrases like “won’t you please close the door?”, which suggest submissiveness; and a habit of ending declarative statements with a rising tone of voice which saps them of force. She also observed that women are less likely to tell jokes than men, less likely to use vulgarity, more likely to use hyper-correct grammar and to speak with exaggerated politeness, and more likely to “speak in italics”—that is, stressing words because the speaker fears she is not being listened to.          

This points to the main reason why I (and other feminists) have had a problem with LWP.  In reception—particularly once it was published in book form for a wider audience—Lakoff’s description of women’s language became increasingly detached from her larger argument about language and power, and was treated instead as a “deficit theory”, a straightforward, freestanding account of what women were doing wrong. Fifty years later, the Times repeats this gesture. Its use of indirect speech (“Dr Lakoff observed that…”) (a) implies that what Lakoff presented in LWP was a factually accurate description of women’s speech, and (b) endorses the judgment of that speech as deficient (if a way of speaking is said to “suggest submissiveness” or “trivialize statements” that can’t really be interpreted as anything but a criticism).

In reality, however, both the accuracy of the description and the validity of the judgment were disputed right from the start. In the Signs review I mentioned earlier, Barrie Thorne suggested that Lakoff’s presentation of women’s language, which by her own account was based on introspection rather than empirical analysis of actual linguistic data, might owe more to cultural stereotypes about women than to facts about their real-life behaviour. She raised, in other words, the basic question of whether claims like “women as a group use more hedges/ tag questions/ rising intonation /politeness than men” would stand up to rigorous investigation. In the years that followed there were many attempts to investigate these claims empirically, and overall the results were mixed: in some cases there was little or no evidence that any significant sex-difference existed, while in others the evidence supported Lakoff’s intuitions. But even in those cases, another question arose: was Lakoff also right about what women’s ways of speaking meant or did? Was the “deficit” reading of hedges or tag questions the only or the most convincing interpretation?

As I pointed out in an early post about women allegedly over-using the word just, there are very few linguistic features that can only have one meaning or function. Tag questions, for instance, can indeed convey uncertainty (“she didn’t really say that, did she?”), but they can also be used to elicit the views of others, often in a way which is directive rather than tentative. “That was a stupid thing for her to say, wasn’t it?”, for instance, conveys not only that the speaker herself thinks it was stupid, but also that she expects or wants the person she’s addressing to agree. In a study I published with two of my students in 1988 we found that it was typically the more powerful party (e.g., the doctor in a doctor-patient exchange or the presenter on a radio phone-in programme) who made more use of tag questions; in the contexts we took our data from, what the use of tag questions reflected was not the speaker’s gender but their role in the interaction. It’s easy to conflate the effects of gender with those of role or status because in many real-world settings these variables are not entirely independent, but if you examine them separately it will often turn out that gender is not the best predictor of behaviour.

If you wait long enough it may also turn out that what you initially identified as a feature of women’s language was actually evidence of a more general change in progress–it’s just that women adopted the innovative form slightly earlier than their male peers. This is how many sociolinguists today would analyse the phenomenon of rising intonation on declarative sentences (aka “uptalk”). Though when Lakoff remarked on it fifty years ago it was mainly associated (at least in the US) with young women, it has since become common among younger speakers generally. But its adoption by so many young men as well as women casts doubt on the deficit explanation of it as something women do because as subordinates they are constantly driven to seek others’ approval. The continuing popularity of that story says more about our attachment to sex-stereotypes than it does about the functions of uptalk.

The disagreements and debates this element of LWP has prompted ever since it was published were never purely academic (in the sense of having no relevance beyond the proverbial ivory tower): Lakoff’s description of women’s language was if anything even more influential in the so-called “real world”. Though she made use (as Barrie Thorne pointed out) of pre-existing popular stereotypes, in LWP these were repurposed to tell a larger and more compelling story about where they came from (patriarchal socialization), what they had in common (sapping the speaker’s message of force) and how they affected women’s position in society (by causing them to be seen as weak, subservient and powerless). And this turned out to be a story which many feminists, and people who claimed to support them, could get behind. By the 1980s Lakoff’s list of women’s language features was being used (albeit often without acknowledging the source) as a foundation for training courses, self-help books and other kinds of advice that set out to “empower” women by eradicating the speech-habits that were allegedly holding them back. Over time the list of these so-called “female verbal tics” has expanded, but the original items taken from LWP–hedging, uptalk, tag questions, hyper-politeness–are still going strong. As a longtime student of these materials I can attest that even if the person who wrote them has never heard of Robin Lakoff, a reader familiar with LWP will be able to discern its traces.

You might think it’s unfair to hold Lakoff responsible for the use made of her work by the female self-improvement industry. Up to a point I agree: I’m certainly not suggesting that she actively encouraged it. I do think, however, that the popularity of LWP in that context played a part in giving the book its remarkable longevity, and turning its always-disputed claims about women’s language into “zombie facts” that no amount of evidence-based debunking can kill off. As a culture we love sweeping claims of the form “men do this and women do that”; we also love the idea that ambitious individuals from a historically disadvantaged group can overcome their dysfunctional social conditioning and reinvent themselves by going on a course or downloading an app that teaches them how (not) to use language. Lakoff did not tell that particular story (which I imagine she, like most linguists, thought was bullshit), but the story she did tell was grist to its mill–and that too, at least IMO, must be considered a part of her legacy.

For me that makes her a complicated figure. She did, without doubt, make an important contribution to the academic enterprise I would later become part of myself, and that should be acknowledged; so should her contribution as a teacher and mentor to many other women in linguistics. And my feelings about LWP are, as I said earlier, mixed: it’s not that I see nothing in it to admire. Though I basically agree with Barrie Thorne about the shortcomings of the introspective approach, I also think Lakoff’s original essay was an incisive and elegant piece of work—in part precisely because it was a think-piece, led by ideas rather than data. If you’ve never read it you might be surprised by how readable it is, with very little of the kind of clutter (like endless citations and definitions of terms) that makes most academic journal articles so tedious.

I also want to say for the record that IMHO the book’s “other” section, the one that seems almost to have been forgotten, has aged surprisingly well. Or maybe that should be “depressingly well”: what strikes me when I re-read it is how much of what Lakoff said about the linguistic representation of women in 1975 (“language works against the treatment of women as serious persons with individual views”) is still relevant in 2025. Though far more women today occupy roles which ought to qualify them to be treated as “serious persons”, the language used by the media to talk about them continues to rely on the same sexist tropes that Lakoff and others drew attention to fifty years ago. Formulas we expected to be long gone by the 21st century have somehow persisted: in February this year, for instance, the Oxford Mail reported the human rights lawyer Amal Clooney’s appointment as a visiting professor under the headline “University role announced for George Clooney’s wife”.

Lakoff said herself that she viewed LWP as a preliminary exploration of the territory rather than a detailed map (she expected others to undertake further research), an attitude which arguably made it easier for her to ask questions, and make proposals, which generated controversy and thus debate. In academia those are not bad things: in the early stages of a field’s development it can actually be helpful for some bold soul to give what many people think is the wrong answer to a question, if that helps to clarify why the question is important and prompts others to look for better answers. Which is exactly, I would say, what happened in this case. Over the years on this blog I’ve featured many examples of work which, in revisiting the question of how women speak and why, has provided us with better answers than we had before (here are some examples dealing with apologies, swearing and slang). Everyone who does that kind of work is part of a tradition that includes Lakoff; their work is to some extent in dialogue with hers, even if her name is never mentioned.

But the answers I consider “better” (meaning more theoretically sophisticated and with more evidential support) have not captured the popular imagination in the same way as the account sketched in LWP. In terms of popular uptake, the only serious rival to that account has been the one put forward by Deborah Tannen (a former student of Lakoff’s at UC Berkeley) in her 1990 bestseller You Just Don’t Understand, which reframes male-female inequality as quasi-cultural difference and social conflict between the sexes as misunderstanding. And one conclusion I might draw is that feminist linguists, like women speakers, are caught in a double bind. If what we say resonates (or is capable of being made to resonate) with popular folk-beliefs about men’s and women’s language, there’s a good chance it will be taken up more widely–though it may also be exploited for commercial or personal gain by know-nothings and grifters. But if it directly challenges what most people believe, it will gain little or no traction outside our own community.

Which, I wonder, is worse? To be cited as an authority by the “wrong” people, or to be ignored by virtually everyone? Robin Lakoff was one feminist linguist who did make an impression on both the academy and the wider world; but whether the positive consequences that flowed from that outweigh the ones I regard as negative is a question I find genuinely hard to answer.   

Language and the brotherhood of men

debuk

I started writing this post on what one Facebook friend called ‘a sad day for women and for justice’: Brett Kavanaugh had been sworn in as a Supreme Court justice in spite of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony that he was one of two men who sexually assaulted her at a high school party in 1982. As in 1991, when Anita Hill testified to being sexually harassed by Clarence Thomas, the Senate hearings were a stark reminder of pretty much everything feminists object to about the patriarchal treatment of women—their bodies, their experiences and, not least, their speech.

The speech of Christine Blasey Ford featured prominently in media commentary. A couple of journalists contacted me with questions about her speech patterns, and I know of at least one other linguist who was asked for her expert opinion. As this colleague remarked, it was telling that these requests were all about Ford. Nobody asked us to comment on Brett Kavanaugh’s speech patterns, or the language of the male Senators on the Judiciary Committee. That’s usually the way it goes. People don’t tend to treat a male speaker as a generic representative of his sex: they’re more likely to ask what his speech patterns say about him as an individual. Women’s linguistic performances, by contrast, are routinely treated as performances of gender—and this is true whether the commentator is feminist or anti-feminist, sympathetic or hostile to the woman concerned.

One tactic right-wing anti-feminist commentators couldn’t easily use in this case was the one they used against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election campaign, namely decrying a woman speaker as ‘shrill’, ‘abrasive’, ‘bossy’, ‘harsh’, ‘strident’, etc. Ford’s vocal performance was, by common consent, none of those things. But for the right wing pundit Rush Limbaugh that in itself was a reason to be suspicious:

It’s an odd speech pattern for an accomplished woman. I’m not denying that it could be legit. But it’s a speech pattern that garners sympathy. …she comes off as an up-talker, ends sentences with an upward inflection, which is how young girls — young teenage girls — come off. It makes the speaker sound uber-nice and harmless, non-aggressive, sensitive, vulnerable and so forth, like there’s not a mean bone in their body.

This is an attempt to discredit Ford’s testimony by suggesting that her performance was inauthentic. Why would this middle-aged academic use uptalk, an intonation pattern which is stereotypically associated with teenage girls, if not to manipulate us into thinking she was ‘uber-nice and harmless’? The message is ‘don’t be fooled: this is a plot to bring down an innocent man’. Other hostile comments on Ford’s uptalk and her so-called ‘baby’ or ‘little girl’ voice (like the ones quoted in this Economist piece) conveyed a more familiar but equally negative message: ‘don’t be impressed, it means she’s not a reliable witness’.

Feminist commentary on Ford’s speech was dominated by the idea (first popularized in the 1970s by the linguist Robin Lakoff) that her performance reflected the way women are socialized from girlhood to communicate. Here’s a typical example from the Huffington Post:

For countless women watching, her gestures struck a chord. Every knee-jerk “thank you” and “I’m sorry” felt like words so many had uttered before, part of a familiar display of courtesy we’d all performed at some point ― out of sheer necessity. Out of a desire to make other people, not ourselves, feel comfortable at all costs. …From an early age, girls learn that authority figures will reward them for being amenable and punish them for being “too” assertive.

There are problems with this ‘We Are All Christine Blasey Ford’ line of argument, an obvious one being that we are not all Christine Blasey Ford: women, their ways of speaking, and even the prejudices that confront them when they speak, come in more than one variety. And it was clear that not all women identified with Ford. Some evidently felt more sympathy for Kavanaugh, or for the husbands/sons/brothers they could imagine being in his position.

But in any case, why was there so much emphasis on Ford’s speech patterns? For me, what made the hearings so revealing was the light they shone on men: they showed how men, or more exactly a particular subgroup of highly privileged men, use language to perform both gender and power.

As many commentators noticed, the account Ford gave of her assault suggested that what motivated her assailants, Brett Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge, was less a desire for sexual gratification, or even power, than a need to impress and to be approved of by one another. Lili Loofbourow dubbed it ‘toxic homosociality’: two men abusing a woman ‘to firm up their own bond’.

One telling detail in this regard was Ford’s vivid memory of the two men laughing together as they held her down.  According to the neuroscientist Sophie Scott, laughter evolved as a social bonding behaviour: research has found that

you laugh more when you’re with other people and you want them to like you; it establishes that you like them, that you are part of the same group as them, and that you agree or understand.

Language can fulfil the same functions. The New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino commented that what Kavanaugh and Judge were doing in their assault on Ford seemed a lot like what Donald Trump and Billy Bush were doing in the purely verbal exchange that was captured on tape in 2005, and made public a few weeks before the 2016 presidential election. I agree: as I said in my own post about the tape, the speech genre Trump called ‘locker room banter’ is all about male homosocial bonding. It’s another case of men using women’s bodies (in this case, talking about them and what you have done or would like to do to them) to ‘firm up their own bond’.

Banter was clearly part of the culture Brett Kavanaugh and his high school buddies inhabited. Their yearbooks were full of sexual boasting, joking and slang terms that expressed contempt for women. Since written evidence had survived, Kavanaugh could not deny that he was familiar with words like ‘boof’ (anal sex) and ‘devil’s triangle’ (intercourse involving two men and one woman); but when questioned he chose instead to lie about what was meant by these terms (glossing the first as ‘flatulence’ and the second as the name of a drinking game). On the face of it this seemed odd, given that the terms were not part of a secret code known only to his immediate circle; millions of people knew their real definitions. But this is how fraternal loyalty works: as with Fight Club and the Mafia, the rule is that you don’t talk to outsiders, and if you’re forced to talk to them you obfuscate or lie, trusting that your brothers will have your back.

In my post about Trump’s banter I argued that fraternal loyalty is central to the workings of modern patriarchy: its effects are felt far beyond the proverbial locker room. And I would argue that they were felt at the Senate hearings, which became, during Kavanaugh’s testimony, another arena for male bonding. Though it was Kavanaugh’s performance that drew most attention, he was not left to defend himself alone: other men, especially the Republican men who dominated the committee, collaborated in this effort. Of course their support for him was politically motivated; but it was also gendered, expressed in terms of what they shared as men.

One thing the Senators evidently identified with was Kavanaugh’s performance of the role of the devoted family man who has been unable to protect his family from the damaging effects of the accusations against him. In this role he was angry and tearful, prompting some feminists to remark on the double standard which allows men to emote in public without being labelled hysterical or crazy. Several Senators got quite emotional on his behalf: Ted Cruz, for instance, said that

watching your mother’s pained face has been heart-wrenching as she’s seen her son’s character dragged through the mud after not only your lifetime of public service but her lifetime of public service as well. And I know as a father, there’s been nothing more painful to you then talking to your daughters and explaining these attacks that the media is airing.

Another thing that resonated with these men was the idea that any man could find himself in Kavanaugh’s predicament—facing the loss of his career because of something he did as a teenager. Boys, after all, will be boys: who hadn’t got drunk and done stupid things in high school?  (If the stupid things in question were sexual assaults, one answer to this question might be ‘women’.) And as the 85-year old committee chair Chuck Grassley said in a TV interview, who could remember what happened 35 years ago? (Again, one answer might be ‘a woman who’d been sexually assaulted’.)

Their loyalty to Kavanaugh was also evident in the way they responded to his testimony, which was very different from Ford’s. She had been an extremely co-operative witness, answering questions directly when she could and stating clearly when she could not; she didn’t shout, interrupt, argue, ramble, attack the questioner or turn the question back on them. Brett Kavanaugh, by contrast, did all those things–and in most cases he wasn’t challenged. However aggressive, evasive or irrelevant his answers were, his Republican brothers had his back.

I don’t think anyone’s use of language had much impact on the outcome of these proceedings. That was a political decision, and with hindsight we might well think that nothing anyone said during the hearing (short, perhaps, of Kavanaugh confessing to the assault) was ever going to make any difference. But in another way, language was central to this story: it was all about the power of speech.

The ability of men to abuse women with impunity relies on two things: the support of other men and the silence of women. Breaking that silence is a powerful act: in speaking about what was done to her, the woman who was treated as an object becomes an agent. In this case, her decision to speak made Christine Blasey Ford a threat–not only to Brett Kavanaugh’s ambitions, but also to the hopes of the politicians who were using him to advance their agenda. These men worked together to neutralize that threat. And they succeeded, in the sense that their candidate was confirmed; but only because they had the numbers. Not because their speech was more powerful. It wasn’t, and I think some people who supported Kavanaugh–people like Susan Collins and Rush Limbaugh, who were noticeably reluctant to call Ford a liar–knew that. So did all the women who looked at him and saw the faces of their own abusers.

So, appalled though I am by the elevation of Brett Kavanaugh, I do also see some reason to be hopeful. In 2018 as in 1991, a woman testifying at a Supreme Court confirmation hearing told the truth about her life, and the world did not split open. But one day, if women keep on speaking, it will.

Note: quotations from the Senate proceedings are taken from this transcript, which is available on the website of the Washington Post. 

How to write a bullshit article about women’s language

debuk3 Comments

This blog’s recent campaign against the linguistically ill-informed and politically counterproductive policing of women’s language (if you missed it you can catch up here and here) has generated a lot of interest, and numerous correspondents have sent me links to other examples. Some of them I’d seen before, but others were new to me. I do try to keep up, but the sheer volume of this stuff would make doing it properly a full-time occupation. Fortunately, most bullshit articles about women’s language are fairly similar. If you want to write one, here’s my handy how-to guide.

First, identify some linguistic thing everyone believes, or can be persuaded to believe, that women do (for this purpose it doesn’t matter whether they really do it, or whether men do it just as much). You could choose something that’s already been defined as a problem (like uptalk or vocal fry), or, more ambitiously, you could go for something no one’s been paying close attention to (like women over-using the word ‘just’ at work). Pitch a piece on ‘Why this thing women do with language is damaging to women’ to the editor of just about any publication. It’s a perennially popular formula and there’s always a place for it somewhere.

You can establish that the thing is a real thing by using anecdata and exploiting confirmation bias. ‘Have you noticed that thing women do?’ you might begin. If the thing is already a cliché, like uptalk, then you’ll immediately have them nodding; if it’s not then they probably won’t have noticed it, but many of them will think that’s only because they’re not as observant or as keenly attuned to the zeitgeist as you are. Either way, you’re priming them to accept your premise. Then you can follow up with a tedious anecdote involving some everyday scenario your reader can relate to. Like, ‘the other day at my office, a woman made a presentation where she did X a heck of a lot; my interest was piqued and I started counting Xs, which confirmed that women do X far more than men.’

Once people have accepted that there’s something to be noticed, they’ll be susceptible to the phenomenon known as ‘confirmation bias’—a tendency to notice things that match your expectations (in this case that would be instances of women doing X), while failing to register counter-examples (women not doing X, or men doing X). Soon, everyone will be sharing your article on Facebook with comments like ‘This is so true! I’d never noticed women doing X before, but after I read this piece I heard it everywhere!’

When you’re arguing that X is damaging to women, it’s good to add a couple of links to research, because that makes you look serious and well-informed; but be selective about this. One useful tip is to choose research that investigated people’s attitudes to X rather than their actual use of it. The attitudes people express when they’re asked what they think about X have probably been shaped by reading articles like the one you’re writing, so what they tell you is likely to support your argument (e.g., ‘I hate it when women do X, it makes them sound weak/shallow/like idiots’). This doesn’t really settle the question of what X does or how it’s heard when it’s used in real life situations, but readers might not notice that.

Another potentially useful source is ‘self report’ studies where instead of recording and then analysing people’s behaviour, researchers ask them questions like ‘do you do X?’ ‘How much do you do X?’ ‘Why do you do X?’, and then analyse the answers. This approach is always a bit problematic because of the tendency for people to tell researchers what they think the researchers want to hear, or what they think shows them in the best light; but it’s particularly problematic in relation to language-use, because we don’t have much conscious awareness of a lot of the patterns in our own speech, let alone much insight into the reasons for them. (A particular pleasure during the last week has been listening to people denouncing vocal fry while audibly using it themselves. I don’t think they’re hypocrites, I think they genuinely aren’t aware they do it.)

My next tip is to say things which sound superficially plausible, but on closer inspection are vague and confusing. Don’t be tempted to clarify a point by using concrete examples to illustrate it. If no one is quite sure what you’re talking about, they’ll find it harder to challenge your point with factual evidence.

For example, in her article about the problem of uptalk and vocal fry, Naomi Wolf claimed that the way women speak also affects the way they write. Talking about university students, she said that ‘even the most brilliant tend to avoid bold declarative sentences’. That’s a strong claim, which it ought to be possible to substantiate or refute by analysing a sample of women’s academic writing. The trouble is, it’s unclear what features of written language you’d need to analyse.

‘Declarative sentences’ is clear enough: it means sentences that make a statement rather than asking a question or issuing a command. No problem with spotting and counting those. But that’s what makes the claim confusing: as anyone knows who’s either written or read one, no one avoids declarative sentences in academic essays. Wolf can’t possibly be suggesting that women write essays consisting entirely or mainly of questions and/or commands. So her claim must be that women’s declarative sentences aren’t sufficiently ‘bold’. And that’s where it gets vague: in linguistic terms, what distinguishes a ‘bold’ sentence from a timid one?

If I defined a ‘bold declarative sentence’ as ‘a statement made without qualification’, I could point to evidence which challenges the presupposition ‘bolder is better’. Research has identified the use of hedging (language that weakens the writer’s commitment to the absolute truth of a proposition—like ‘it has been argued that…’ or ‘one possible explanation of this is…’) as a key feature of ‘good’ academic writing (the kind that gets published, or gets high marks). It’s a sign that the writer can exercise critical judgment and avoid overstating his or her case. In academe that’s considered a virtue, not a flaw. But Wolf could just respond that my definition of ‘bold’ wasn’t the one she had in mind. This makes arguing with her like trying to nail jelly to a wall.

If your article generates controversy, and people start responding to it critically, you can re-use some of the strategies I’ve just described. If the criticism is ‘But men do X too’, counter it with some anecdata. ‘Yes, but I’ve noticed they stop doing it when they’re at an important meeting’. (If you’re lucky, no one will have gathered data on that very specific point, so your critic won’t be able to say definitively that you’re wrong.) If someone says, ‘but doing X doesn’t mean a speaker lacks confidence’, bring in a bit of self-report data about what people said when they were asked about their reasons for doing X (‘women agreed that they tend do X when they’re not feeling confident’). If you’re accused of making vague and confusing statements, throw some more vague and confusing statements into the mix. By the time your opponents have deconstructed them all, the world will have moved on to something new.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean your article will be forgotten. The subject of gender differences in language-use is a rich source of zombie facts—myths that refuse to die no matter how often and how authoritatively they’re debunked. Who can forget, for instance, the claim that women utter nearly three times as many words as men do in a day? The author who made it in 2006 had to retract it after various researchers pointed out publicly that it was bullshit. Yet it keeps being resurrected: in 2010 a colleague of mine found it being recycled as a joke on a shampoo bottle (‘what do women do three times more of than men? A: Talk!’).

If your article has done its job, its thesis will join this body of folklore, and future generations will recycle it in their own bullshit articles. (Probably without giving you credit; but you can’t really complain, since the chances are that your own article was also partially or wholly recycled, like an estimated 94% of all bullshit articles on this topic.*)

Of course, not all the articles which appear in the media are bullshit. I’m not saying the only stuff worth reading is the stuff you find in academic journals. Popular writing can be well-researched, informative and thought-provoking. But if an article you start reading has more than one of the characteristics I’ve mentioned in this post—the reliance on anecdote, the links to research which didn’t investigate what people do, only what they think they do, the claims which are too vague to be tested, the loaded but ill-defined terms, the repetition of zombie facts—that’s probably a sign that it doesn’t deserve your attention. Bullshit may endure, but it doesn’t have to be endured.

*In the great tradition of bullshit, I plucked this figure from thin air, and then phrased my claim to imply that someone else had put some thought into it.

Just don’t do it

debuk44 Comments

This week everyone’s been talking about an article in the Economist explaining how men’s use of language undermines their authority. According to the author, a senior manager at Microsoft, men have a bad habit of punctuating everything they say with sentence adverbs like ‘actually’, ‘obviously’, ‘seriously’ and ‘frankly’. This verbal tic makes them sound like pompous bullshitters, so that people switch off and stop listening to what they’re saying. If they want to be successful, this is something men need to address.

OK, people haven’t been talking about that article—mainly because I made it up. No one writes articles telling men how they’re damaging their career prospects by using the wrong words. With women, on the other hand, it’s a regular occurrence. This post was inspired by a case in point: a piece published last month in Business Insider, in which a former Google executive named Ellen Petry Leanse claimed that women overuse the word ‘just’.

It hit me that there was something about the word I didn’t like. It was a “permission” word, in a way — a warm-up to a request, an apology for interrupting, a shy knock on a door before asking “Can I get something I need from you?”

Leanse went on to describe an experiment she conducted at an event where two entrepreneurs, one male and one female, had been asked to give short presentations. While they were out of the room preparing, she instructed the audience to count how many ‘justs’ each presenter produced.

Sarah went first. Pens moved pretty briskly in the audience’s hands. Some tallied five, some six. When Paul spoke, the pen moved … once. Even the speakers were blown away when we revealed that count.

Personally I’m not blown away by sweeping generalizations based on counting frequencies in a tiny, unrepresentative data sample. But I’m just a nitpicking linguist: for Leanse this was all the evidence she needed to conclude that women should stop saying ‘just’ and ‘find clearer, more confident ways of making your ideas known’.

Commenting on this for Jezebel, Tracy Moore opined that as well as getting their just-count down, women also needed to stop apologizing all the time. ‘The “sorry” epidemic is well-documented’, she asserted, citing a report whose opening sentence turned out to be this:

Although women are often stereotyped as the more apologetic sex, there is little empirical evidence to back this assumption.

That doesn’t sound to me like an announcement of an epidemic. But why bother with evidence when you can put your faith in stereotypes?

On Friday, BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour did exactly that. During an item in which the comedian Viv Groskop discussed her new show about women’s habit of constantly saying sorry, another guest, the linguist Louise Mullany, pointed out that the stereotype of women constantly saying sorry has not been borne out by research. But the presenter and Groskop just brushed this aside. Everyone knows that women ‘over-apologize’. The question is—to quote the trailer on the programme’s website—‘why do women do it, and how can they stop?’

This isn’t a new question. Back in the 1990s I surveyed advice literature aimed at ‘career women’ and found it full of finger-wagging injunctions like these:

Speak directly to men and stand firm when you are interrupted. Statistics show that women allow themselves to be interrupted up to 50% more often than men. Don’t contribute to those statistics!

Men typically use less body language than women. Watch their body language to see how they do it.

What this advice boils down to is ‘talk like a man’. The writer doesn’t even try to argue that there’s some inherent reason to prefer ‘less body language’ (whatever that means) to more. It’s preferable simply because it’s what men are said to do. Men are more successful in the workplace, so if women want to emulate their success, the trick is to mimic their behaviour.

Even in the 1990s the flaw in this reasoning was obvious. Men’s greater success in the workplace is largely a product of their privileged status as men: just imitating their behaviour won’t give women their status. Yet here we are in the second decade of the 21st century, recycling the same old advice.

Last year National Public Radio in the US aired a story entitled ‘Can changing the way you speak help you find your voice?’,  in which ‘Hanna’, a lawyer worried about her high-pitched voice, went to a speech and language therapist to be made over as a more ‘authoritative’ speaker.

Hanna learned to open her throat, creating more oral resonance, to adopt what she now calls her “big voice.” [The therapist] also taught her to use fewer words and be more direct. Instead of asking, “Got a minute?” when she wants to talk to a colleague, she now declares, “One minute.” She carefully enunciates, “Hello,” instead of chirping, “Hi!” like she used to.

Another thing Hanna worked on was her tendency to use ‘uptalk’, a popular term for an intonation pattern where declarative sentences are produced with rising rather than falling pitch (linguists call it the ‘high rising terminal’). It is now commonly used by both sexes, but (like many linguistic innovations that go on to become mainstream) it originated among young women, and because of that it continues to be criticized for making you sound like a clueless airhead. In the late 1990s it was so stigmatized, a number of elite women’s colleges in the US actually instituted classes to stamp it out.

Today the title of ‘most stigmatized female vocal trait’ has passed from uptalk to the newer phenomenon of ‘vocal fry’ (in linguists’ terms, creaky voice).  Similarly, ‘just’ has inherited the mantle of the tag question (as in, ‘it’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?’), a popular target for advice-writers when I surveyed their products in the 1990s. The critics’ pet peeves may change over time, but the criticism itself is a constant.

This endless policing of women’s language—their voices, their intonation patterns, the words they use, their syntax—is uncomfortably similar to the way our culture polices women’s bodily appearance. Just as the media and the beauty industry continually invent new reasons for women to be self-conscious about their bodies, so magazine articles and radio programmes like the ones I’ve mentioned encourage a similar self-consciousness about our speech. The effect on our behaviour is also similar. Instead of focusing on what we’re saying, we’re distracted by anxieties about the way we sound to others. ‘Am I being too apologetic?’ and ‘Is my voice too high?’ are linguistic analogues of ‘is my nail polish chipped?’ and ‘do I look fat in this?’

For some women, like Hanna, this low-level dissatisfaction may escalate to the point where more drastic measures seem called for: they seek expert help to transform their speech in the way they might seek surgery to do the same for their breasts or their stomachs. I’m not criticizing Hanna, whose voice had attracted negative judgments in her workplace evaluations. She did what she felt she had to do. What I’m criticizing is the attitudes that made her feel she had to do it–just as I criticize the attitudes that make women feel they need to look twenty years younger or wear jeans three sizes smaller.

It bothers me that even feminists don’t seem to see the force of this analogy. When feminists encounter articles with headlines like ‘Are you eating too much fruit?’ or ‘Why implants are the new Botox’, they know they are in the presence of Beauty Myth bullshit, whose purpose is to make women feel bad about themselves. Feminists do not share those articles approvingly on Facebook. Yet a high proportion of my feminist acquaintance did share Leanse’s ‘just’ piece, and some of them shared the Jezebel commentary which appeared under the headline ‘Women, stop saying “just” so much, it makes you sound like children’. An article headed ‘Women, stop eating so much fruit, it makes you put on weight’ would immediately have raised their hackles. So why was the Jezebel piece acceptable?

You may be thinking: but surely there’s a difference. Telling women to be thin is holding them to an oppressive patriarchal standard of physical attractiveness, whereas telling them to stop apologizing, or saying ‘just’, is actually liberating them from an oppressive patriarchal standard. Apologizing and saying ‘just’ are forms of deferential, accommodating behaviour which women are socialized to engage in as a mark of their subordinate status. Then, when they enter the world of work, the fact that they talk this way is used to justify treating them as lightweights.

That was more or less what the pioneering feminist linguist Robin Lakoff argued in her 1975 book Language and Woman’s Place.  Girls, she said, are taught to ‘talk like ladies’, which means in a way that makes them sound unconfident and powerless. Lakoff dubbed this way of speaking ‘Women’s Language’, and one of the features she included in her description of it was hedging–using linguistic devices that reduce the force of an utterance. For instance, saying ‘I’ve got a bit of a headache’ rather than simply ‘I’ve got a headache’. Or ‘I don’t really like it’ rather than ‘I don’t like it’. Or ‘I’m just going out’ rather than ‘I’m going out’.

Leanse’s criticism of ‘just’ picks up on this much older feminist argument. But it’s an argument that most linguists now regard as problematic. Part of the problem with it is the idea that excessive hedging is characteristic of women as a group. Today linguists are wary of generalizing about women as a group. Forty years after Lakoff’s groundbreaking work, we’ve learned that all such generalizations are over-generalizations: none of them are true for every woman in every context (or even most women in most contexts). We’ve also learned that some of the most enduring beliefs about the way women talk are not just over-generalizations, they are–to put it bluntly–lies. An example is the pervasive belief that women talk more than men, when research shows consistently that it’s the other way round. (If you want to know why people are so wedded to false stereotypes about gender and language, I discuss this in my book The Myth of Mars and Venus, and you can read the relevant part here.)

The other part of the problem has to do with the function Lakoff attributed to hedging: making utterances less forceful, and thus reducing the speaker’s authority. When later researchers looked in detail at the way words like ‘just’ were actually used, it became apparent that they don’t only have one function. In some contexts ‘just’ does do the job of a hedge, but in others it acts as a booster, the opposite of a hedge. Think of Nike’s slogan, ‘Just do it’. It’s hard to imagine they chose those words because their brand values included weakness and lack of confidence. Or look at these examples from a conversation recorded by the linguist Janet Holmes, where a woman talking to her husband uses ‘just’ three times in as many turns.

That meeting I had to go to today was just awful
People were just so aggressive
I felt really put down at one point, you know, just humiliated

These ‘justs’ aren’t uncertain or apologetic. Rather they’re emphatic, a way of underlining how strongly the speaker feels about the awfulness of the meeting.

Even when ‘just’ does function as a hedge, the effect isn’t necessarily to make the speaker sound unconfident. Consider these examples (all said to me or overheard by me in real life):

Could you just give me a minute? (Call centre agent putting me on hold)
Is it OK if I just ask you a couple of questions? (Journalist calling me for a comment).
Maybe you could just eat a little bit. (Adult to child at a nearby table in a café)

All of these are requests—speech acts whose force is, essentially, ‘I want you to do something for me’. Leanse evidently realizes that requests are prime ‘just’ territory, but what she doesn’t appear to understand is why. When you ask someone to do something you’re imposing on them: showing you’re aware of that, and trying to minimize the imposition, is a basic form of politeness. How polite you need to be depends on the seriousness of the imposition and the specifics of the context: if you see someone’s about to get hit by a car you yell ‘move!’, not ‘I wonder if you could just move a few feet to the left’. But in most situations, some degree of politeness is normal. Leaving it out doesn’t make you sound ‘clearer and more confident’. It makes you sound like a rude, inconsiderate jerk.

So what women are being criticized for–using ‘just’ when they make requests–is not a form of excessive feminine deference, it’s a way of being polite by displaying your awareness of others’ needs. Where is the logic in telling women not to do that?  I think we all know the answer: it’s the logic of patriarchy, which says ‘a woman’s place is in the wrong’.

Marybeth Seitz-Brown came up against this logic when an interview she gave on US radio prompted a flood of criticism of her speech—specifically, the fact that she used the high rising terminal intonation, aka ‘uptalk’. The listeners who criticized her insisted they were doing it for her own good. They thought that she sounded unsure of herself, and she’d be taken more seriously if she changed the way she spoke. Here’s her response:

I really do appreciate these listeners’ concerns, but the notion that my uptalk means I was unsure of what I said is not only wrong, it’s misogynistic. It implies that if women just spoke like men, our ideas would be valuable. If women just spoke like men, sexist listeners would magically understand us, and we would be taken seriously. But the problem is not with feminized qualities, of speech or otherwise, the problem is that our culture pathologizes feminine traits as something to be ashamed of or apologize for.

I think Seitz-Brown is right: the problem isn’t women’s speech, it’s the way women’s speech is pathologized and policed. Anyone who does that should be greeted by a chorus of ‘you ignorant sexist, just STFU’.