https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/23/how-do-you-pronounce-scone-answer-says-a-lot-english-language-day-shakespeare-birthday
- It is not a matter of being posh, or thinking you are posh...It is more a matter of where you grew up
- Our language continually reshapes itself
- though very often we detect changes, we really don't understand why they have taken place
- The idea horrifies some English language teachers but at the end of the day we have to accept that words and their pronunciation are flexible and changeable
- They are not fixed entities to be enshrined in stone
- Baratta reports that people often feel as if they have to flatten out their accents to escape judgement
- but simultaneously feel ashamed at this betrayal of their self-identity
- it's difficult to foster any kind of pride in our accents when everyone - even academia - keeps telling us how disgusting we sound.
- As a society, we need to recognise the effects that accentism can have on people and the insecurities it creates. It's not joke
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11939909/sexist-words-school-playground-report.html
- School students are no longer allowed to use sexist language to bait each other in the playground, such as 'man up'
- head teachers are being urged to ensure that sexist language is taken as seriously as racist language.
- Schools are also being asked by the report to appoint senior teachers as 'gender champions', appointing them with the task of encouraging more girls to take traditionally 'male' subjects such as economics, computer science and physics at GCSE and A-level and more boys to take 'female' subjects such as English literature, foreign languages and psychology.
- The subject choice gender divide has been partially blamed for the pay gap
- "Language is a very powerful tool. You have to be so conscious of what you are saying to children.”
- Hamleys is ditching its separate floors for boys and girls along with their pink and blue signs and replacing them with signs that simply state the types of toys sold.
- Twitter accused it of operating "gender apartheid".
- Lauren Nelson, a neuroscientist, believes that young children's development can be limited if they play with only one sort of toy.
- 2007 research showed that in general when asked women tend to identify redder colours as their favourite – a finding reported widely as proof that women prefer pink.
- preferences may arise from socialisation or cognitive gender development rather than inborn factors.
- Eliot argues that infant brains are so malleable that small differences at birth become amplified over time
- There are sex differences in the brain. There are also large sex differences in who does what and who achieves what.
- There is no scientific evidence that boys prefer blue and girls prefer pink.
- It's clear that colour preference is learnt rather than innate.
- There is a popularly held view that girls and boys play with stereotypical toys because they learn to see this as appropriate for their sex.
- "These books exist, but we think there are better ways of choosing for children than basing it on whether they are a boy or a girl," said Waterstones spokesman John Howells.
- Boys and girls should be free to choose what books interest them, the Let Books Be Books campaign argues
- "these books send out very limiting messages to children about what kinds of things are appropriate for girls or for boys,"
- The term “girls” should really be limited to the under-13s.
- “Girls” screams of gender-segregated toys and the colour pink. It reads: childhood and vulnerability.
- Calling women “girls” is especially undermining and patronising in the workplace.
- It says a lot about the sexualisation of young women that the term “girls” refers to both pre-teens and women as sexual objects
- Sharing one's pronouns and asking for others' pronouns when making introductions is a growing trend in US colleges.
- "It maximises the student's ability to control their identity,"
- The alternatives to "he" and "she" are myriad.
- This use of "they" annoys some grammarians.
- Universities, however, remain the most fertile ground for new pronouns.
- we want to try and galvanize as many men and boys as possible to be advocates for gender equality.
- feminism by definition is: “The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.”
- No country in the world can yet say they have achieved gender equality.
- Men don’t have the benefits of equality either.
- We don’t often talk about men being imprisoned by gender stereotypes but I can see that that they are and that when they are free, things will change for women as a natural consequence.
- It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum not as two opposing sets of ideals.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/12/theresa-may-handbags-and-kitten-heels-how-not-to-write-about-prime-ministers
- meaningless, sexist commentary takes valuable attention away from what we should be concentrating on.
- “I like to think of myself as more than a head of hair or a set of looks,” added Harington.
- "he is actually describing is feeling objectified, which certainly isn’t a phenomenon belonging to a single gender.”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jun/22/unilever-sexist-stereotypes-ads-sunsilk-dove-lynx
- 40% of the women surveyed said that they do not identify at all with the women they see in advertising.
- women are rarely presented as having authority
- “It was globally resounding that women are ever advancing in terms of equality, structure and human rights,”
- “Yet the media and advertising specifically have been slow to reflect the changing shape of gender identity and often depict, at best, a current view of society, and sometimes a backward view.”
- Men interrupt more than women overall
- The men I observed interrupted twice as often as the women did.
- Men are almost three times as likely to interrupt women as they are to interrupt other men
- Men do interrupt other men, but far less often
- Women interrupt each other constantly, but almost never interrupt men.
- The more senior the speaker, the more they interrupt
- There are no senior women who aren't interrupting their male colleagues
- The results suggest that women don’t advance in their careers beyond a certain point without learning to interrupt, at least in this male-dominated tech setting.
https://newrepublic.com/article/117757/gender-language-differences-women-get-interrupted-more
- both men and women are more likely to interrupt and to use dependent clauses when speaking with a woman than with a man.
- Hancock and Rubin didn’t find any significant differences in the way men and women spoke
- The most obvious such difference proves to be the female’s greater deadliness.
- Some people like to believe that generalisations about the male or female character are all bogus
- “women have spent so many years girl-powering ourselves – to the point of almost parodic encouragement – we’ve left no room to acknowledge our dark side. Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids.”
- Both women were already world champions so why was there a need to compare them to men?
- "For far too long women's sport has been treated as a second-class game."
- "I'm shocked at how we seem to have gone backwards in how we describe women competitors,"
- "Men aren't immune from comments about their physique, such as when wearing tight trunks, but women get it more and it's more important because of the history of inequality."
- "Many commentators say 'girls' in sport even if they know they should say 'women'. This is because they think it's a trivial issue to do with political correctness and they forget in the heat of competition,"
- "But when you call a woman a girl you are actually infantilising her. A girl is a child. Women's bodies have long been infantilised in popular culture as youth is seen as attractive."
- the media is inclined to refer to "women's football" and call men's football just "football".
- Do write about the sports they did. Don’t bring their makeup, very small shorts and marital status into it
- The Olympics offer up women’s bodies for public scrutiny on a massive scale
- Women are fully-formed, autonomous people who do things. We are not pets or gadgets or sex-baubles.
- Men have more speaking roles in Hollywood than women do.
- The sexes communicate differently (and women do it better) because of the way their brains are wired.
- The female brain excels in verbal tasks whereas the male brain is better adapted to visual-spatial and mathematical tasks.
- Women like to talk; men prefer action to words.
- The proposition that men and women communicate differently is particularly uncontroversial
- cliches such as "men never listen" and "women find it easier to talk about their feelings" referenced constantly
- The idea that men and women "speak different languages" has itself become...an unquestioned article of faith.
- The idea that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate is a myth in the everyday sense: a widespread but false belief.
- Baron-Cohen classifies nursing as a female-brain, empathy-based job...and law as a male-brain, system-analysing job
- They are based on the everyday common-sense knowledge that most nurses are women and most lawyers are men.
- Language and communication matter more to women than to men; women talk more than men.
- Women are more verbally skilled than men.
- Men's goals in using language tend to be about getting things done, whereas women's tend to be about making connections to other people. Men talk more about things and facts, whereas women talk more about people, relationships and feelings.
- Men's way of using language is competitive, reflecting their general interest in acquiring and maintaining status; women's use of language is cooperative, reflecting their preference for equality and harmony.
- These differences routinely lead to "miscommunication" between the sexes, with each sex misinterpreting the other's intentions.
- Perhaps men have realised that a reputation for incompetence can sometimes work to your advantage.
- the relationship between the sexes is not only about difference, but also about power.
- In relation to men and women, our most basic stereotypical expectation is simply that they will be different rather than the same.
- men interrupt more than women and women self-disclose more than men.
- Focusing on the differences between men and women while ignoring the differences within them is extremely misleading but, unfortunately, all too common.
- some studies find that women talk more in domestic interactions with partners and family members: in the domestic sphere, women are often seen as being in charge.
- In informal contexts where status is not an issue, the commonest finding is not that women talk more than men, it is that the two sexes contribute about equally.
- Modern men and women, by contrast, are under the illusion that they speak the same language.
- But though the words they use may be the same, their meanings for each sex are different.
- The result is that men and women often do not understand one another.
- What was once just a metaphor has acquired the status of literal, scientific truth.
- Today, it is widely believed that misunderstanding between men and women is a widespread and serious problem.
- the idea that women communicate less directly than men was associated with concerns about women's alleged lack of assertiveness and confidence.
- Is avoiding male-female miscommunication an exclusively female responsibility?
- Human languages are not codes in which each word or expression has a single, predetermined meaning.
- some "misunderstandings" are tactical rather than real. Pretending not to understand what someone wants you to do is one way to avoid doing it.
- there are no real conflicts, only misunderstandings, and no disagreements of substance, only differences of style.
- the idea that men and women have a particular problem because they differ systematically in their ways of using language...does not stand up to scrutiny.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/oct/07/mind-your-language-corporate-jargon
- ideas culled from those business manuals that embrace the language of self help
- Why do so many of these inane phrases continue to be used despite widespread ridicule?
- politicians feel obliged to ingratiate themselves with business leaders by speaking their language
- Journalism is hardly immune to mangled language
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