MemeMachineGo!

An interview with Suzette Haden Elgin, lingust, sf writer, and author of the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series, and other linguistics books:

The other thing that's going on right now, and I don't know how new this is, I don't know exactly where it started, but there is a very major split between the sexes in terms of the metaphor that they use to guide their behavior. For most American men, it's the football game. Most male adults operate out of a football game metaphor. Most female American adults operate out of the metaphor of the traditional schoolroom. And what that causes is the most incredible thing. It means that males and females use the same words with very different meanings attached. For example, the easiest one to understand is, if you're on a football field, it is not a lie to pretend you have the ball when you don't. It's not a lie to act as if you're going to run one direction and go the other way. That's the way the game is played. In the traditional schoolroom if what you say or do is false, it's a lie. Period. So what we have coming out of that is this constant business where the woman is saying, "You lied" and the man is saying, "I did not." And she's saying, "It wasn't true" and he says, "I know, but it wasn't a lie." When you run into that kind of thing, you know immediately these two people agree lying is wrong, but they don't agree as to what lies are.

We have the same problem with violence. Men and women define it differently. We have the same problem with cheating and cooperating and teamwork. Remember what cheating is in a traditional schoolroom? You have to work all by yourself with no help from anybody or it's cheating. On the football field, this just would not do. That particular item, that metaphor split, is what is the basic reason for all of the communication problems.