He said it was just that the guy was a good actor so he made it funny (ditto with the second video in the OP).
This seems right to me on both counts.
Yup. All correct. Husband X understands the phenomenon completely.
I will bet, al, that although you ask both men and women for huge favors, you only touch the arm of men whose help you need.
This happens to such a degree in Japan that the words of lower-status women are sometimes almost incomprehensible over the phone, since they are talking at such a high pitch.
1. Between formal classes and talking to his girlfriend, a friend of mine became reasonably fluent in Japanese, and he felt pretty good about it, but when he talked to people in public outside class sometimes they'd burst out laughing, because he'd learned to talk like a girl. The differences between men's language and women's language in Japanese is great enough that it's sometimes treated as part of the grammar.
2. Some of my Chinese friends in Taiwan told me that a certain grammatical particle (sentence-final "ne") was mostly used by women, because it was used for whining, wheedling, and politely suggesting.
There are some languages that do indeed have real grammatical differences between men's and women's speech.
my grad school boyfriend was a linguist, and just because of the way human's ears are we can hear differences better when the words are at a certain pitch; as you go higher the words become difficult to distinguish (you can imagine the limit point of a mosquito-like whine.) IME more narnian women than men use the particle "leh," which has a similar, wheedling tone. "can you get me that one leh? only five dollers leh?" fuck, I use leh all the time. :-(
banned emotoconz!
The differences between men's language and women's language in Japanese is great enough that it's sometimes treated as part of the grammar.
Grammar and vocabulary and pitch and tone. And kanji versus hiragana til this century.
Meshi and gohan both can mean "meal" "boiled rice."
According to what I know, women rarely use meshi, and men rarely use it with other men, because in usage it translates to "FEED ME NOW!"
Ozu in the 30s gently showed his feminism by having one middle-class young woman learning kanji in every other movie.
The sexism, patriarchy and misogyny is fucking awesome, and to be fair, the pushback is also awesome, and ubiquitous in what I encounter. It's complicated.
Story around somewhere about an American man in Japan losing his roommate of five years because she couldn't stand him talking like a girl. Think about it.
Using the Pimsleur, I am starting to hear the language, and I not sure I like it much. "-masu" every fucking line, even between lovers.
It's complicated, because it is very open and played with by both genders.
Of course, much of what I know (but far from all) is from movies, mostly movies directed at female audiences made by fairly liberal artists.
leh = Malaysian lah or is there a difference?
Some of my Chinese friends in Taiwan told me that a certain grammatical particle (sentence-final "ne") was mostly used by women, because it was used for whining, wheedling, and politely suggesting.
Many more gender-distinct suffixes like that in Japanese too.
I thought it was generally rendered "lah" in Singlish. I tried to verify this on Talking Cock, my only source for Singlish, and found suggestions of disputed possession.
Is that related to the mandarin le (了）? Doesn't seem like it fits.
Some words are the birds', eh?*
I've always thought "Du doch nicht!" was, like "Archibald, certainly not!,"** a feminine-sounding phrase for macho types to have adopted.
* No, I'm not proud.
** Whence "Archie," for anti-aircraft fire.
I suspect that Singapore / Malaysian lah / leh are equivalents of Mandarin "ne", not Mandarin "le". The official Chinese of those places is Mandarin, but the colloquial Chinese is probably Cantonese, Fukienese, or Hakka, and Singlish probablt borrowed from one of them.
5 reminds me oof an old joke. A woman takes a pickle out of a barrel, and asks the merchant, "How much for this pickle?"
"A nickle."
She frowns, puts it back into the barrel, picks up another one. "How much for this one?"
The merchant points to the sign saying "Pickles - 5 cents" and reads it aloud.
The woman then digs through the barrel for the tiniest pickle she can find, about half the size of the first, and says, "How much for this pickeleh?"
"Just a nickeleh."
I just saw a plenary talk about computer learning and speed dating. The goal was to get machines to recognize when people were flirting, based on various aspects of what they said during the interaction. There were marked gender differences, including that flirting women talk more about themselves and flirting men talk more about the woman (it was a very heteronormative study).
Also when women flirt they laugh more. When men flirt they laugh at the woman. At least the grad student subjects in the study do.
The goal was to get machines to recognize when people were flirting, based on various aspects of what they said during the interaction.
But... why? As discussed extensively here recently, flirting does not necessarily indicate any kind of sexual interest. I suppose this might be different in a speed dating context.
Anyway, the study results sound interesting regardless of their implications for dating.
But... why?
So that the researchers can write programs to help them figure it out IRL?
Yes, but why would they want to do that?
Well, it was among several different things about text-based extraction of meaning with potential real-world applications that included better automated translation generally and maybe less irritating robot voices on phone systems in particular? He also talked about other projects and tied it all together or whatever but the speed dating part was funniest.
They were doing training about recognizing friendliness too; I don't know that the "flirting" dimension was very goal-oriented, other than quantifying the sociolinguistics of it for more academic purposes.
I'm just teasing; the research does sound interesting.
21: So they have a machine to tell them when someone is flirting with them because they have no clue.
25: Somehow I don't think that's going to work out how they expect.
Also, being a plenary, it was targeted to be broadly engaging/appealing to all the non-computational linguists who did react very well to the whole thing. Because it was funny. All the speed daters had shoulder-mounted mics etc.
Interesting to maybe only Teo: flirting women had raised pitch ceilings, while flirting men had raised pitch floors.
After all the serious people asked their questions about corpus size and bootstrapping and whatnot, I asked if any of the participants actually went on dates. Answer: yes.
Interesting to maybe only Teo: flirting women had raised pitch ceilings, while flirting men had raised pitch floors.
That is interesting, although on reflection not necessarily surprising, assuming I'm interpreting it correctly to mean that women had a larger pitch range than usual while men had a smaller (but higher) one.
Ask if the dates involved bootstrapping.
Now I'm leaving to be networky at a bar. Woo drunk linguists!
Woo drunk linguists!
Woo! I'm just drinking at home.
The flirting women had increased volume/intensity range as well. The flirting men did not talk about academic topics.
34: Again, interesting but not surprising.
35: Good. Go forth and drink!
"leh" is different from "lah," and less commonly used. narnians finish every other sentence with lah. it can soften a request but usually indicates that matters are out of our hands. "always like that one, lah" means "what did you expect? this situation always turns out like this." or resignation, but also emphasis. I remember my maid telling girl y to take off her shoes and she said angrily "I take off already lah!"
"leh" by contrast is used way less and is wheedling or request-making. "but it's only a short drive, leh" i.e. please drive me to this place although you don't totally want to." there is "lor" also but I don't know how to use it properly.
The flirting men did not talk about academic topics.
flirting with alameida FAIL.
I thought men were supposed to lower their pitch floors when flirting...laydeez.
No, that's for threatening to destroy the earth and stuff. Although I suppose that too could be flirtatious in some contexts.
Anyway, I did a post on gendered language, partly inspired by this post and heebie's.
I've been filmed a couple of times now for my store (and I've had to slow down my speech a lot for anyone to understand it, so I usually take a xanax before filming starts.) the weird thing is, I discovered I have a relatively low speaking voice, and I thought it was high-pitched. I guess things sound different in your head? my mom has quite a low voice which is made fabulous in timbre by years of bourbon and smoking. I thought I sounded totally different from her, but I was wrong. seems like a very odd thing to be wrong about.
I knew a guy in math grad school who was a totally obsessive womanizer. I once went out to a bar with him and another guy who was closer to the girl-inept stereotype. The first guy talked about math constantly, and made goofy math jokes (though at the level where a non-math person might get), and the other guy kept trying to get him to stop doing it because he thought it would scare away the women.
I guess things sound different in your head?
Yeah, it does, because you're hearing it partly from the inside, as it were. I.e., some of how you perceive your own voice comes from the vibrations that reach your inner ear directly from your vocal cords, whereas what everyone else hears is only what actually comes out of your mouth. It's pretty common for people to be surprised at how they sound in a recording.
43: kind of counter-productive on the part of inept guy, though, right? unless they were just looking to find some floozy for the night, surely they want the kind of women who laugh at math jokes?
I was in a hostel years ago where I tried to steer a conversation towards physics to flirt with a woman who seemed visibly embarrassed to be seen in the common area with some sort of physics text she'd been reading. I was pretty sure from our brief conversation that she was doing something at CERN that summer. I don't know if the strategy would have worked, but within five minutes the people running the hostel announced that we reached curfew (at like 11 PM) and everyone had to leave the common areas, and the way the hostel was structured, men and woman were in different parts of the building, accessible by different stairways.
Come to think of it, I can think of multiple instances of flirtatious conversations I had that involved academic subjects that were cut short by hostel gender separation rules. I don't know why I stayed in those places, except they did seem to attract the type of tourist I had more in common with than the party-oriented places.
I've never really seen the appeal of hostels, beyond the fact that they're cheap. I guess that's enough for some people.
Cheap, yes and also if I'd traveled alone for any length of time staying in hotels, it would have been a very quiet trip. I'd have a hard time getting myself to stay in a hostel now, though.
if I'd traveled alone for any length of time staying in hotels, it would have been a very quiet trip
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.
I should note that I've basically only traveled alone domestically. I imagine it would be rather different abroad.
Thinking back to heebie's recent post on privacy, back when I was staying in hostels and traveling on trains I was a lot less social than I am now in "normal" life, but I rarely felt like I needed extra privacy.
I suppose I'd make a distinction between what I guess I'd call social and asocial solitude. It was generally acceptable to be simply polite, but not necessarily outgoing in hostel rooms and common spaces if you didn't feel like it. Similarly, you don't have to talk to other passengers on trains. Even now, when I've lived in cities with extensive rail transit, I've gone out to ride to the ends of lines to get some "alone" time that isn't really alone.
That's interesting. I feel like I don't really have the same need for "social" solitude. When I want to be alone, which is often, I want to be completely alone, with no one else in sight or earshot. This is why I always hated living with roommates.
I pretty much always hate living with roommates. But there are different social conventions to that. You'd think I'd have enjoyed living with other solitary people, as I did on two occasions where I had a roommate I rarely spoke to, but it eventually got really annoying to have this quiet other presence in the apartment. I've gotten along best with roommates who are basically indifferently friendly, not actively socializing, not actively hermitifying.
My best roommate experiences have been with roommates who have also been friends, and who have tended to get me to go social events that I would have most likely skipped if it had been just me. On balance I would still have preferred to not have roommates even in those situations, though.
the appeal of hostels is partly that they're so cheap you can extend your trip to cambodia for many days longer than otherwise. but it's true you also meet people there and sometimes decide to travel on with them for a while. when my ex and I bought a motorcycle to drive from Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi we inspired our new friend from the #9 hostel in cambodia to make the trip with us. it was hella fun. unfortunately, I basically never had enough time alone with him to get around to having sex, which I would have liked, but the world's not perfect.
I found a while back that I had the same issue with not knowing what my voice sounds like. Inside my head, it's a deep, husky, Lauren Bacall kind of thing. On tape, nasal and squeaky, more in the Donald Duck register.
Yeah, in my head my voice sounds really deep. Whenever I hear recordings it's much higher. Still not, I think, high-pitched but not as it is to me. Except when hungover, when my actual speaking voice more closely matches my internal one.
42: I've had to slow down my speech a lot for anyone to understand it
I can see that. It's your thick southern drawl™. I get around 70%, guess 20% and have to let 10% go to the keeper. Slightly incomprehensible, totally awesome. Not a bad trade-off.
wait, really? am I that incomprehensible? and you're a professional listener-to of languages! and I don't have a southern accent! maybe I should take a xanax before we next have lunch or something?
According to several others, I sound like Sean Connery. This apparently makes women eager to bed me. I hear it in my head as a little below tenor, and on playback as Donald Duck.
Man, I can't even conceptualize what it would mean to sound like SC without a thick Scottish accent.
God, yesterday I had to watch a video of myself doing a cross-examination, and I don't know how anyone can stand to be in the same room with me. The voice, the posture, the gestures. Blech. Why is it that self-knowledge leads so quickly to self-loathing?
Your mother asked for a thick Scottish accent last night, Trebek!
I hate my voice, which is probably why I mumble all the time, in print and in person.
On video, I look like an escapee from a silent-era mad scene, all pasty whiteness and arching black eyebrows and flying fingers.
66: 'cause you're comparing yourself to Mozart again. You stop doing that and life gets a whole hell of a lot better. Then you die.
There's nothing wrong with your voice, Bave. Whereas my voice is weird and I have an annoying habit of swallowing the ends of words. Also, whenever I hear recordings of myself I'm surprised by the amount of uptalk.
all pasty whiteness and arching black eyebrows and flying fingers
Hot.
72: Yeah! Morticia on the intertubes. Great image.
When I hear recordings of my voice, it sounds like I'm congested, but I swear I'm not. I don't like it at all, which I gather is common.
re: 69
Now I imagine you looking like Clara Rockmore.
http://www.nadiareisenberg-clararockmore.org/clara_ihow.htm
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Woot! I called it first.
The Last Psychiatrist ...says Pe/nelope Tr/unk is classic BPD
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TLP seems a bit disordered himself. Or at least, annoying.
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76 link is a great post with terrific comments
Aspbergers do not post, with sly justifications, pictures of their ass on the Internet. They do not understand the complexity of the responses well enough.
BPD is absolutely incompatible with Aspbergers. BPDs have tons of fucking sensitivity and mountains of empathy...that's how they can manipulate so well.
And claiming to be Aspy is a great excuse to be an asshole and go through the cycle of rejection and re-acceptance.
Oh. And those who says they were tricked and trapped by her into pity and advice-giving, telling her to leave, need to check out their own narcissism. What did they get out of it?
(Hey, it's more fun than Hilferding versus Uno Kozo. I needed a break)
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Bob is totally right, especially with "BPD is absolutely incompatible with Aspbergers".
I got to have a pretty constant reminder of what I sound like for a number of years since apparently both of my sons' voices (after puberty) sounded enough like mine that when I answered the phone people (including my mother) who weren't my wife would almost always mistake me for one of them. Happens less these days (partly they have not always been around), but I conclude that they are now more mature sounding than me.
74: I too sound like I have a cold when I talk. Always thought it was just one of those things, but recently it turned out that it's the result of a specific intranasal malformation something like a deviated septum. Correcting it involves surgery, though, so I don't think I'll bother.
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Up tonight on cable, and goddamn I am excited about watching Sucker Punch
that offers a big middle finger to Hollywood convention, audience expectations, and anybody and everybody who would rather watch "The King's Speech."And buried inside that pastry, deep within the candy-chewy, garters-and-machine-guns center, is a nugget of dark and deadly poison.
Thing is, the people who diss SP for the sexploitation are also getting their rocks off. What do you think subversion in America would look like, Stewart & Colbert? Sheeet.
Emily Browning is currently playing a drugged-up toy for ancient lechers in a version of a Kawabata novel. Typecasting. The blond wig in SP really sucks.
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Sucker Punch is certainly special. Make sure to go back and read "One Flew Over The Coochie's Nest" and related when you're done.
I sort of feel that should be narnglish. I'll fix it. reading the entry I realize I do know how to use lor, I just forgot it for a moment. "if you want to go, then go lor." i.e. but don't expect me to com bail you out. hmm, let's see. I can use 'leh' and 'meh.' 'hor' I would feel iffy on. in general my friends made fun of me for speaking narnglish on channel 5 to my narnian interiewers/comedians, but it's very hard not to adapt your speech patterns to those of other around you.
Hey, is this the thread where we're complaining about godawful attempts at a southern accent? Because I submit Kyra Sedgwick, from The Closer, as the absolute worst fake southern accent of all times. She sounds like she's chewing gummy worms.
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Good God. That hurt.
85:Well, obviously Kesey.
Jesus, I'm speechless.
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nomination of sedgwick seconded. people sometimes say its a good show but I can't listen to her for even 10 seconds. that was why it was so great that on "lost", the guy with a southern accent...was from the south! astounding! hollywood doesn't seem to realize there are different southern accents, bless their hearts, and often end up with some daughter of the confederacy in a be-columned mansion talking like the people who live in trailers 4 miles away.
I find it hard to "imitate" a southern accent, but I do get one when I go home. then when I call my friends they laugh at me.
I sort of feel that should be narnglish.
Sorry about that. Would it be better for me also to avoid TC links in future?
TLP seems a bit disordered himself. Or at least, annoying.
It's interesting how sometimes someone whose blog persona is "rich guy who laughs at how naive and dumb people are" becomes way popular among leftist bleeding-heart types. Others might be Epicurean Dealmaker and the now-retired "Taunter".
(it was a very heteronormative study)
I think flirting, ceterus paribus, is heternormative.
minivet: no, that's fine.
spaz: why so? women can't flirt with each other? I've seen them do it... and how do queer guys ever find anybody, handkerchief codes?
just walking up to each other and saying "wanna fuck?" to be perfectly fair, I have actually seen a guy do this once. in the context it seemed abrupt but fine.
97: Back in the day my wife encountered a very pleasant, unthreatening guy standing at the entrance to a supermarket propositioning women as they entered. Maybe it was a sociology experiment (ethnomethodolgical division.)
Back in the day it was widely believed that this was a foolproof way to get laid eventually, if you weren't in any hurry. Probably is.
I know they have run more than one like that to compare women's responses with men, using only straight propositioners. the idea would be to measure how open women were to having casual sex vs men. it's of course totally ludicrous since the woman has to wonder whether she might not be raped and killed by this stranger in his home. thus "sensible unwillingness to risk death at the hands of strangers" becomes "women are less open than men to the possibility of casual sex." also, did they carefully control for attractiveness? stupid sexist sex research.
As far as I recall, exactly these points were made when the "research" you mention was published. Not rocket science. What amazed me at the time was that somebody didn't question the experimental design before it ever went ahead. I mean you could be as sexist as hell and still notice that it was a crap experiment for telling you anything useful.
99: I know at least one guy who did quite well with this technique. Used with a certain amount of finesse (polite, friendly, at locations where it's not implausible that someone might be looking to get laid), if you have an ego like rhinoceros-hide so that the 99 rejections you get for every acceptance don't bother you, and you're reasonably undiscriminating about who you want to have sex with so it's not impossible to find 100 women to ask, I'm told it works.
97: I thought the rules were that it didn't count unless you said "Nice boots" first.
"sensible unwillingness to risk death at the hands of strangers" becomes "women are less open than men to the possibility of casual sex."
Next on the agenda was a stiff defense of the honor of womanhood by Alameida of Narnia, who argued that if you control for serial killers women are too just as slutty as me.
closer to sluttiness parity, anyway.
The question of slut parity needs to be refined. Sure, 22-yr-olds at single bars, maybe.
How about 40-yr-olds with 20 years of marriage and 5 kids? 80-yrs-old and in a wheelchair?
How about on a bus or light-rail? In the stands of a concert or sporting event? The sibling of your partner? The parent of your partner?
Then, of course, there is the dog thing.
Where is our post-revolution Kinsey?
How about on a bus or light-rail?
The several-feet-high club.
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OK, I am ready to piss off everybody and comment o Sucker Punch.
1) The IMDB threads are rife with interpretations and explications that make the von Trier and Malick threads look weak.
2) The most important scene is probably only on the director's cut. This is Jon Hamm as High Roller finally raping BabyDoll. According to what I have read, he is the very height of gentleness, kindness, consideration, patience, seductiveness, Don Draper doing his very best. BabyDoll starts in terror, relaxes, trusts, relaxes...
...bang. The stainless steel needle into the forebrain. Lobotomized. Doc:"Damn. She looked at me like she wanted it."
3) "Consent" is lobotomy.
4) The allusion to Kesey are obvious. And what was going on with the patients in the ward, including to an extent McMurtry? What was Cuckoo about? It was about the patients consenting to Ratched's supposedly benign authority, McMurtry trying to get them to resists, and his ultimate complete failure. There are all the various fantasies and delusions of freedom McMurtry tries to instill and deploy.
Final:In the capitalist patriarchal rape culture racist hegemony, there is no freedom, there can be no consent. There is no consent.
Those who think they are freely consenting are imagining agency in their bump and grind, and imagining a kindly therapist in a mindfucking rapist.
8/10
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109:The Marxism really helps here.
It really never crosses the Marxist's mind that WalMart workers are free agents bargaining to take the min wage job without benefits in a negotiation of equals. It is to laugh, it is to cry.
So why is any woman free in a relationship?
There is no consent. The patriarchy has nothing but rape.
The false consciousness? Sure, go kill a 50 foot firebreathing dragon with your mighty sword.
Fantasies of power.
And sure the college-educated UMC graduate thinks they are freely negotiating the terms of their employment, and the intelligent UMC college woman feminist thinks she can create a consensual mutually respectful relationship between equals.
This is the bullshit of the house slave.