You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation
Deborah Tannen
Language: English
Pages: 342
ISBN: 0060959622
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Women and men live in different worlds...made of different words.
Spending nearly four years on the New York Times bestseller list, including eight months at number one, You Just Don't Understand is a true cultural and intellectual phenomenon. This is the book that brought gender differences in ways of speaking to the forefront of public awareness. With a rare combination of scientific insight and delightful, humorous writing, Tannen shows why women and men can walk away from the same conversation with completely different impressions of what was said.
Studded with lively and entertaining examples of real conversations, this book gives you the tools to understand what went wrong -- and to find a common language in which to strengthen relationships at work and at home. A classic in the field of interpersonal relations, this book will change forever the way you approach conversations.
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recalls her childhood companion Marek in her book Lost in Translation: I’m in love with him. I can’t stay away from him, even though sometimes he plays boyishly mean pranks on me: he drops an enormous tome on my head when I pass in front of his window, and once, he tries to stuff me into a hole in the forest, which turns out to have been left there by the Germans, and might still have some mines in it. Marek’s playfulness was potentially lethal. Nonetheless, Hoffman recalls, “We talk to each
a silence, in which Nora reached across to Zack’s plate and picked up his last curled shrimp and said to him in a warm voice, “You want this?” He moved his head back and forth. Nora held the shrimp up in her fingers before popping it in her mouth and said, “This is undeniably a Vermont shrimp.” She grinned at Pep. She said, “This shrimp regrets everything.” When joking doesn’t do the trick, Nora tries a direct appeal, softened with the use of a nickname that calls on her bond with Zack: “Come
and it accounts for the experience reported by most women, who feel they are often cut off by men. Both claims—that men interrupt women and that women interrupt men—reflect and bolster the assumption that an interruption is a hostile act, a kind of conversational bullying. The interrupter is seen as a malevolent aggressor, the interrupted an innocent victim. These assumptions are founded on the premise that interruption is an intrusion, a trampling on someone else’s right to the floor, an
else is talking. But you can say what you want whenever you think of it.” For her part, my mother can’t understand why my father needs special privileges to say something—why doesn’t he just jump in like the rest of us? And I can recall feeling as a teenager that listening to my father, who is an attorney, explain something to me was like hearing a summation to the jury. So both the man and the women in my family feel oppressed, at times, by others’ ways of talking—he because he is interrupted
ruined it for me? Is that what you want me to forget?” “I won’t discuss it.” “Discuss what? What won’t you discuss?” “Shut up! I won’t have you screaming in the hotel.” “I don’t give a fuck what you won’t have me do. I’d like to be treated civilly. I’d like you to at least do me the courtesy of telling me why you’re in such a funk. And don’t look at me that way . . .” “What way?” “As if my not being able to read your mind were my greatest sin. I can’t read your mind. I don’t know why you’re