• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

In a striking series of studies, Stanford’s Lera Boroditsky has demonstrated how the language you are speaking at the time dictates how you remember pictures or events. A bilingual Japanese-English speaker would likely remember the relative status of three other people if introduced to them in Japanese rather than in English. A bilingual Turkish-English speaker will remember my talking about Austin’s weather differently if we spoke in Turkish compared to English.

Indeed, when anything is translated from one language into another, parts simply disappear or are created. If I have to translate “thank you very much” into Spanish, I will have to make an educated guess whether to make it a formal or an informal you. And when the same phrase is translated back into English, the formality information is stripped away.

Interestingly, nouns and regular verbs generally translate across languages fairly smoothly. It is the function words that can cause the biggest problems.

LANGUAGE STYLE AND PSYCHOLOGY: MAKING THE LEAP TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Function words are everywhere. We use and are exposed to them all the time. They are virtually impossible to hear and to manipulate. And many of these stealth words say something about the speaker, the listener, and their relationship. But this book really isn’t about function words per se. If you are talking with a friend and mention “a chair” versus “the chair” versus “that chair,” it really says very little about you. However, what if we count your use of articles over the course of a day or week? What if we find that there are some people out there who use a and the at very high rates and another group that tends to not use articles at all?

In fact, there are people who use articles at very high rates and others who rarely use them. Across hundreds of thousands of language samples from books to blogs to everyday informal conversation, men consistently use articles at higher rates than women. And, even taking people’s sex into account, high article users tend to be more organized and emotionally stable. Indeed, men and women who habitually use a and the at higher rates tend to be more conscientious, more politically conservative, and older.

And now things start to get interesting. Using articles in daily speech doesn’t make a person a well-adjusted, older conservative politician like John McCain (who, in fact, used articles at high rates compared to his opponents in the 2008 presidential election campaign). Rather, the use of articles can begin to tell us about the ways people think, feel, and connect with others in their worlds. And the same is true for pronouns, prepositions, and virtually all function words.

This is the heart of my story. By listening to, counting, and analyzing stealth words, we can learn about people in ways that even they may not appreciate or comprehend. At the same time, the ways people use stealth words can subtly affect how we perceive them and their messages. Before starting our journey on stealth words and the human condition, you might need a brief road map to jog your memory about what different function words mean. At the end of the book, a short word-spotting guide is available. As you study your own language or the words of others, you can refer back to the guide as needed to better understand what the words mean.

CHAPTER 3

The Words of Sex, Age, and Power

THERE IS NO better way to start a discussion of language and differences among people than with gender. Do men and women use words differently? As you may suspect, the answer is yes. Now that this has been established, take the following test.

In daily conversations, e-mails, informal talks, blogs, and even most formal writing, who uses the following parts of speech more, men or women?

For each of the questions, circle the correct answer:

1. First-person singular (e.g., I, me, my):

a. women use more

b. men use more

c. no difference between women and men

2. First-person plural (e.g., we, us, our)

a. women use more

b. men use more

c. no difference between