"But What Do You Mean" Precis

Deborah Tannen’s essay “But What Do You Mean?” with its precise diction and conversational tone, elucidates the ways women form their speech and the flaws with which they come when speaking to men. Being that “conversation is a ritual,” we often expect what we think is obvious to be said by the other person; “unfortunately, women and men often have different ideas about what’s appropriate, different ways of speaking.” Women tend to apologize when they need not to and men see it as a mask over a person’s competency when they do so. While most women try to cushion your ego’s fall when criticizing, men are directly to the point and tend to let it fall from a mile high onto the concrete. This is because women tend to regard feelings when speaking while men operate “on an assumption that feelings aren’t involved.” Often a woman will thank someone for doing what is required and if that person happens to be a man he most likely will not counter that person’s thank you with his own, he’ll instead say “your welcome,” leaving the woman at the receiving end of an apparent favor that really is not a favor at all. “Men expect the discussion of ideas to be a ritual fight — explored through verbal opposition,” but most women try to be non-confrontational. This makes it easy for women who do not know how to play this adrenaline logic game susceptible to hurt feelings. It is proven to be helpful that women learn how to verbally spar when dealing with men, because their ideas are taken more seriously and their opinions are better heard. Women give praise in hopes that they will receive it, but men find ways to critique instead. This rebuttal-a-praise-with-a-critique method can be a way for men to one-up themselves or simply a misunderstanding of intentions. Whatever the case, it helps to know when and whom to ask indirect questions. The consequences of complaining for women can be serious. “A man might take a woman’s lighthearted griping literally, and she can get a reputation as a chronic malcontent. . . she may [even] be seen as not up to solving the problems that arise on the job.” As is well known the ways men and women joke are almost polar opposites. While men tend to razz, tease, and use mock-hostility, women self-mock. “Women often mistake men’s teasing as genuinely hostile [and] men often mistake women’s mock self-deprecation as truly putting themselves down.” Whatever the case, if men and women learn to understand the ways the one another speak they will have much better communication.

Vocabulary
deprecation
commiserating

Tone
conversational
scholarly

Rhetorical Devices
1. Anecdote- ". . . a well known columnist once interviewed me and gave me her phone number in case I needed to call her back. I misplaced the number. . . When our conversation was winding down and we'd both made ending-type remarks, I added 'Oh, I almost forgot -- I lost your direct number, can I get it again?' 'Oh, I'm sorry,' she came back instantly, even though she had done nothing wrong. . ." (p. 391)
Why Effective: It is used to illustrate a case in which a woman apologized without being at fault so it's a good example.

2. Logical Fallacy- “The logic is that when are challenged you will rise to the occasion: Adrenaline makes your mind sharper; you get ideas and insights you would not have thought of without the spur of battle.” (p. 392)
Why Effective: It helps the reader's know that when men argue to get ideas out it helps them to think a little sharper, but for women it kind of makes them defensive and they seem a little week if they can't handle it.

3. Metaphor- "When the other speaker doesn't reciprocate, a woman may feel like someone on a seesaw whose partner abandoned his end." (p. 392)
Why Effective: It helps explain what the exact feeling of someone not saying what is expected of them is like for a woman.

4. Irony- "A woman manager I know starts meetings by thanking everyone for coming, even though it's clearly their job to do so." (p. 392)
Why Effective: It helps the reader to better understand that what the woman does makes no sense at all, that it is merely her ritual.

5. Sarcasm- "This made her feel like responding, 'Thanks for nothing!'"
Why Effective: it illustrates how it feels to assume that someone will cancel out what you have just said even though they are not really obligated to do so.

Discussion Questions
Clarification- Would it help or hinder a woman if she were to take on the speech characteristics of a man?
Application- Are these speech barriers between men and women solely apart of American culture or do they exist elsewhere?
Style- With the conversational and teacher like style of this essay, who exactly is the intended audience?

Quotation
‘Oh that’s too dry! You have to make it snappier!’

Outliers Chunk 1: "People Don't Rise from Nothing"

Opening with the phenomena of Rosetans who had long life spans without the interruption of heart disease before the age of 65, Malcolm Gladwell does an amazing job-- in his bestselling novel Outliers-- at explaining how and who "the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are." In the first chapter Gladwell explains the "Matthew Effect," --taken from the concept of an excerpt from the bible-- to explain how hockey players, soccer players, and even gifted students are selected based on a misconception that they are better suited . Gadwell states that instead of being better at what they do, children born in the rather early months of the year tend to exceed a bit more as opposed to children born in the late months due to the extra amount of time they have had to develope, especially in the case of young athletes who at the ages of 10 and 11 are just hitting a vital stage in physical maturity. Over the course of a few years and a bit more time of practice the older child does in fact become better at whatever it is they are training for and an idea based on a faulty premise is proven correct. The second chapter was about the 10,000 hour rule. It sounds like quite a bit of time but it is in fact the key to perfecting any skill, like in the case of Bill Gates who was able to accumulate 10,000 hours of computer programming and start a business with a friend, helping the two of them to become wealthy. Gladwell does however state that the year you were born also has a strong impact on what way and opportunities you will run into; some of the richest people i.e. John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnigie, etc. were born in the early 1800s allowing them to mature just in time for the greatest economic transformation in history. The third chapter goes on to speak about the trouble with geniuses. Although they are intelligent it stops mattering at a certain point. A man can have an Iq of 130 while another has one of 160, thirty points may seem like a major difference but it isn't because as long as the two are smart enough there is no difference. Anything over a certain IQ is unnecessary and with the lack of creativity comes a boring person unable to think outside of the box.

• What do you think of Gladwell's claim that no one is self made?

Microsoft's Multi-Million Dollar Settlement to I.B.M. Gives Way to Suspicion of Trust

James Kanter and Kevin O’Brien collaborated in "In Europe, Intel Faces a Large Antitrust Fine" to illuminate the case against computer chip making corporation Intel which is being investigated by Brussels--- "European antitrust regulators, [who] have been aggressively pursuing what they see as anticompetitive practices among technology companies"--- over complaints from it's archrival Advanced Micro Devices about "abusing its dominant position in computer chips by giving large rebates to computer makers, by paying computer makers to delay or cancel product lines and by offering chips for powerful server computers at prices below actual cost." The journalists use an anecdote to write about and they exppress this anecdote through not only direct quotations but with data from past Intel settlements. This article can be found at (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/technology/companies/30chip.html?_r=1&ref=business)

• Is it fair to accuse Intel of breaking antitrust laws because of the tough competition that it brings?
• Could this story have been written without the use of any anecdotes?
  

A Genetic Revolution Launched on the Backs of Fruit Flies

Alice Park's article What Good is Sleep? New Lessons from the Fruit Fly illustrates the ways scientist have used Drosophila melanogaster or as we know it, the fruit fly, to find out how we humans deal with things like aggression and sleep. Like humans fruit flies need sleep in order to keep from hitting a brain meltdown. "During waking hours, the brain keeps adding new information about its environment, forming new circuits and new connections in an ever thickening neural network," if it never gets any time to cool itself it crashes. In fruit flies and humans alike the brain takes time to regroup from a day of new things to remember, during this time "the brain actively prunes the neural network laid out during waking hours, trimming away weaker connections that haven't been used in a while or weren't strong enough to begin with. The stronger connections are believed to be filed during sleep into long-term memory, where they can be accessed again and again as needed." So you can think of sleep as a pressure release valve. So what do flies do to require them to have to sleep? They eat and mate. While it does not sound very complex, it certainly can be. When the female supply is low, male flies have to compete with one another for the right to mate. But females aren't just looking for any old guy (sound familiar?) they want males that'll be able to provide an adequate food supply for them and the kids. The guy flies are willing to go as far as box if it means they'll get the prize -- food or mate -- and they even tend to have their own fighting style. Male flies rear on their hind legs and lunge at thier opponents when fighting while females head-butt and shove. This information is not very new but Harvard University's Edward Kravitz has been "able to link Drosophila's sex-specific behaviors to genes." When Kravitz bred male flies with female fighting genes, they tended to head-but and shove like females and when he bred female flies with male fighting genes they began to do the more aggresive lunging. The next step in this process is to "see if these same genes appear in mammals' or even the human genome. Chances are good: the fruit-fly genome is made up of 14,000 genes, while the human genome contains 20,000." Because the fruit fly is such a simple organism, we can use our genetic tools to decode it, meaning it will be used for many years to come. You can view this article at (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1889099,00.html)

• Are there any other behaviors scientists have been able to decode in fruit flies?
• Have scientist tested these findings in more complex animals?