The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [20]
3. Men use articles (a, an, the) more than do women. Except for people who read the last chapter closely, hardly anyone would know the answer to this one. Articles? Who cares about articles? I do, for one. And I personally want you to care because they are very important words. Articles are used with nouns—especially concrete, highly specific nouns. A person who uses an article is talking about a particular object or thing. Guys talk about objects and things more than women do. They talk about the broken carburetor, the wife, and a steak on the grill for the dinner. We’ll return to this shameless generalization in a minute.
4. No differences in the use of positive emotion words. Although women use slightly more negative emotion words in everyday conversation than do men, the two sexes use positive emotion words at the same high rate.
5. Women use more cognitive words than men. Cognitive words are words that reflect different ways of thinking and include words that tap insight (understand, know, think), causal thinking (because, reason, rationale), and related dimensions. That women use more of these words is a slap in the face of Aristotle, who believed that women were less rational than men and incapable of philosophical thought. But there is a simple explanation. It all comes into focus with social words.
6. Women use social words at far higher rates than men. Social words refer to any words that are related to other human beings. Surely you got this one correct. Women do, indeed, think more and talk more about other people.
The various sex differences in word use actually make a coherent story. When women and men get together, what do they talk about? Women disproportionately talk about other people and men talk about, well, carburetors and other objects and things. Ultimately, which topics—other people versus carburetors—are more complex and require more cognitive work in explaining? Human relationships are not rocket science—they are far, far more complicated. We can get our top scientists together and send people to the moon. Two speakers—male or female—can troubleshoot a carburetor in under an hour. But even the most creative and diligent scientists, much less two interested speakers, are unable to understand, explain, or agree on why actress Jennifer Lopez is attracted to the men she is or how long she will remain married to her current husband.
PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT TEST: OTHER WORD CATEGORIES THAT DISTINGUISH BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN
The sex-differences test you just took is only the beginning. Men and women differ in a variety of other language dimensions that will be discussed throughout the book. In case there is another gender-language exam, it is important to appreciate that men and women also differ in the following ways:
MEN USE MORE
WOMEN USE MORE
Big words
Personal pronouns
Nouns
Verbs (including auxiliary verbs)
Prepositions
Negative emotion (especially anxiety)
Numbers
Negations (no, not, never)
Words per sentence
Certainty words (always, absolutely)
Swear words
Hedge phrases (“I think,” “I believe”)
These additional language differences buttress what has already been noted. Males categorize their worlds by counting, naming, and organizing the objects they confront. Women, in addition to personalizing their topics, talk in a more dynamic way, focusing on how their topics change. Discussions of change require more verbs.
Finally, one of the most studied dimensions of women’s language concerns hedge phrases, or hedges. Hedges typically start a sentence in the form of a phrase such as “I think that” or “It seems to me” or “I don’t know but …” Consider the meaning of the two following answers to the question