A thought about feelings (and baseball)

“Saying that men talk about baseball in order to avoid talking about their feelings is the same as saying that women talk about their feelings in order to avoid talking about baseball.”
— Deborah Tannen

I’m sure many academics have a dream, however briefly, of breaking through, as it were: popular acclaim for their work, media interviews, speaking tours, acclaim from far beyond their peers.

Deborah Tannen, a linguist who has dozens of academic publishing credits to her name, is better known as an author. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation was not just a best-seller but a full-fledged phenomenon: the book, first published in 1990, was at the No. 1 position for non-fiction on the New York Times best-seller charts for eight straight months.

The book produced this quote, which gets at one of her points: men often talk about information (like baseball scores) as a way of connecting through common interests, just as women find their own social channels and ways of speaking.

Tannen is now 80 and evidently still active. Just this month, she was interviewed by the New York Times about how the word “tranche” has been used so much in the wake of the widening Jeffrey Epstein scandal.