Re: CHAT: BOOK/CHAT: FW: Lunatic Lovers of Language

I already sent this to Hawksinger by mistake -- I don't know why the
address of the list was replaced by his own address.

Hawksinger wrote:
>Nik Taylor wrote:
>
>> Well, except for Baba and Sally Caves, I can't think of any women on
>> this list, so that does seem a good generalization.  I wonder why?
>> Aren't women supposedly better at verbal skills than men?
>>
>Perhaps thats the answer.  They (women) do it easily and naturally,
>we struggle so much with ordinary language we just have to invent
>a new one thats better for us.   I suspect it is related to the refusal-
>to-stop-and-ask-for-directions problem too :)
I agree. It's always been pointed out that women tend to speak more and
with more expressive terms. In many languages the vocabulary of women is
broader and more colorful than that of men. It seems to me that women
create subtly different words naturally from their sources as they need
them, while we men get stuck thinking... This must be related to the fact
that few women build model railroads or assemble motorbikes for fun, for
example. Women work with structures and change them -- men blow up the
structures and build new ones on top of them :-)


--Pablo Flores