Another grexer recently misidentified my gender, for some reason not given
me.  Can you tell, with more than 50% accuracy, what gender someone is from
their writing style, or what they write about?  (As an experiment, you are
all welcome to guess mine.)  Do men think with a different logic system from
women, use a different grammar or vocabulary, or simply express different
interests?  (If you want to play the guessing game, see my Agora items 50,
60, 63, 65, 66, 67).

72 responses total.

There is enough truth in American's sexist stereotypes to make 50%
accuracy easy.  I'd guess that i could hit something in the 60% to 75%
range given a good variety of responses that someone entered.  (Ignoring
responses in "What makeup do you wear" and similar give-away items.)

BUt are there any differences in writing style, rather than content?
Walter, would you go back to the kitchen (conference) and guess my new entry
there?  Nobody is guessing it at all.

Hmm.  I'd say that there's a gray fuzzy zone between style and content
that we're trying to draw a line through.  Certainly i could push my batting
average higher by noting who was more interested in football.  But with
nothing but grammatical metrics (average word length, sentence length,
word and word sequence statistics, etc.) i'd guess that a cleverly-
programmed computer that had assembled such data on all Grexdom (names
removed & replaced with genders) could still get over 60% accuracy
guessing genders.

Can you give some examples of female versus male sentence length or word
sequences, etc.?  That is, can you write the same sentences two different
ways?  Or maybe copy out some sentences from other grexers responses that are
gender-identifiable from somthing other than idea content or even word choice?
Or can you, after reading about 100 pages of a book, guess at the gender of
the author?  I have, at times, caught myself being surprised when I glanced
at the author's name half way through a book.  My roommate wonders whether
female engineers write more like the average engineer than the average female,
or whether male househusbands write more like female housewives.  In other
words, do people write more like others in their occupation, and can you guess
at someone's occupation from their writing style.

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I assumed keesan was a male.  I don't know why...I just did...  =(  Hmmm...
Now you have me thinking.  I also think women tend to use more emoticons. 
(smiley faces, winks, etc)

Please analyze why you assumed keesan was a man.
Can you identify the authors of 'a FRICKIN game of CARDS' and 'oh, dear'. 
And there were some responses with phrases like 'I'd like to learn how to do
that'.  Can language express dominance?  Or subordinance, as in 'just' (your
skills, etc., not being as important as someone else's).  My rommate's comment
on 'frickin' was 'Males use stupid expletices.  Females use expletives I can
understand.'  Re Valerie's use of different pseudonyms:  If you (male or
female) were to pretend to be someone of the opposite gender, would you write
differently?  Try it.  And please give us the results (sample writing).  

Sarah and Valerie, if you know (or think you know) my gender, please don't
'spill the beans'.  I am trying, as sort of a challenge, to maintain a
gender-neutral personality on the bbs.

Would this item be of interest in the femme conference, linked?

I just browed through the headings of the femme conference.  I get the
impression that women are much more interested than men in talking about
communication and emotions.  As regards expressing emotions, I think that is
culture-linked as well as gender-linked, and it might be very difficult to
identify someone's gender from the emotional content of their writing, if they
came from a culture which was more or lless stoic than ours.

The writing style of a person probably has less to do with their gender
than with their background, both with respect to education and experience. 
As examples given above, engineers, regardless of gender, may write in the
style of what they need to write.  Yet sometimes all it takes is to put
yourself in someone else's shoes to see how they feel and write from their
point of view.  A female classmate wrote a short story from a male point
of view that everybody was amazed at, because of how "real" it sounded.

Given the circumstances, people also write differently.  Responding to an
item like this is different from responding to a silly survey item in
agora.

A final point: people may assume male as default in a bbs because in this
society there are still more males using computers than females.  Although
it would be interesting to see the gender ratios on grex, if that
information is available.

<slinkie remaind gender neutral>

Would anyone want to try writing in the style of an engineer, and then writing
the same sentence in the style of some other occupation?

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Amazing the correlations our brains make without us realizing.  When I meet
someone after talking on the phone with them for several years, they are
always larger than I expect, perhaps because their voices sound so small on
the phone.

I don't think of you as either male or female.

Re  #5.  Well, gals are generally free to express their emotions while 
guys are supposed to suffer in silence, so an expression that would almost
be overlooked an incidental from a gal could be taken as symptom of dire
anguish in a guy.

Re  #4.  Other than stuff like "I cried", i can't give examples.  My
assertion is basically that a computer could note lots of barely
significant patterns (that someone used the word "expensive" might make
them 1% more likely to be male, for instance), add them up, and make
substantially-better-than-average (but certainly not great) guesses.

Re  #11.  Hmm!  Sexist Freudian slip!!  Looking down our nose at all 
those lowly messenger boys, are we??? 

Hmm...Well, I know I generally get a 'first impression' of male or female from
new grexers that I see, even when they don't have sex-specific names.  And
I do tend to get readings of 'male' or 'female' in fiction, especially when
it's written in the first person.  But, sometimes these impressions are wrong;
for instance, a piece of fiction I read a while ago written by a male author
froma male character's viewpoint, in which I was certain the character was
female.  I don't know where it is these impressions come from...

It isn't possible to be *sure* about the sex of any Grexer you
haven't met face-to-face.  Most responses have gender-neutral
content; and even when the content seems to imply a female
or male writer, the fact is that anyone can create a pseudo
and pretend to be anything he or she pleases.  Unless the sex
of a Grexer you're communicating with is actually a consideration,
as it is said to be with certain Grexers from a certain
subcontinent, then there should be no occasion to notice it
except maybe in passing as you read names like John, Mary and
Valerie.

For all anyone knows, keesan is a pseudo of some long-time
Grexer.  But the beauty of this medium is that even that doesn't
matter much.  If an item is interesting, it's interesting, be
it created by whomsoever it may.

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Valerie, you have just stumbled into a whole academic field in liguistics.
The best known popularizer of this field is Deborah Tannen.  Her 1990 book,
You Just Don't Understand, is  320 pages of information about "cross-cultural"
communication problems between men and women.  

"From early childhood, girls... use language to seek confirmation and
reinforce intimacy, whereas boys use language to protect their independence
and negotiate status in large-group activities."  

So there are "women's style" and "men's style" language use patterns.  In
fact, this is so well known (if unconsciously) that there is a comic strip
that frequently runs a little "quiz" in which they list two or three phrases
and jokingly asks the reader "which gender is the speaker?"

Re #17, 1st para: The "Freudian slip" was a typo. Look at your
response #11 real closely...

Spoilsport!

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Would a 'male' write 'Doh!'?

Male usage is 'Duh!', i believe.  :)

I'm a male and do write 'Doh!' on occasion. Remember that 'Doh!'
comes from a male character (Homer Simpson).

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"D'oh!"  (correct spelling) has been used by not only Homer and Bart, but on
rare occasion by Lisa Simpson and by Homer's long lost mother.  

I think two very different words are being confused here.  Homer uses a
quick, one syllable "Doh" as a exclamation to denote frustration. 

"D'oh", pronounced with two syllables, the second in a lilt, with a silent
question mark trailing, is a Valley-girlism meaning, "When you went out to
buy a clue did you have much trouble parking your spaceship."  It lends
credibility to the D'oh if at least one party is blonde. 

"D'oh!" is the *official* Simpsons spelling..  I take the Valley Girl
expression as "Duh-uh".

Where can one find "D'oh" officially spelled?

All of the official Simpsons literature, of course.

Did you know there were comic books?  

Another place to see this spelling is (rarely) Matt Groening's "Life in Hell"
comic.

Oops, forgot about the comic books. D'OH!

Excuse me for getting back to the original subject, but I have an alternate
explanation as to why Valerie assumed C. Keesan was a man.

C. Keesan x Kentn = Supermail?

Do names conjure up specific personalities?  Library research
based on the synopses of romance novels yields possible answers.

Hero's names

1.  First names are usually monosyllables:  Jake, Luke, Nick,
Brock, Blake, Hawk, Hank, Cole, Cade, Connor, Kyle, Rafe, Ross,
Rex, Teal, Joe, Slade, Skye, Mac, Matt, Mike, Mitch, Math, Sam,
Ben, Clint, Grant, Quint, and the Sheikh of Xabia

Most of these have a velar consonant (k/c/q/x, g, h/kh), which
sounds somewhat like a gunshot or a fist contacting a jaw.  

2.  Last names are usually longer, also with velars:  Courtland,
Cabrio, Quarrels, Walker, Weeks, Grant, Grayson, Graham,
Tregowan, Murdock, Graves, Clelland, Alexakis, and the Mac's: 
MacKade, MacCreay, MacKail, McClintock (3).  (The Macs may have
generated the Mac-Math group of first names).
 
3.  Longer names (first and last) with initial stress, usually
with the last consonant l(s), m(s), r(t), n(t/d).  Final -n is
most common.  

-r: Hunter, Parker, Denver, Rider, Cotter, Taggart;  Walker
-m:  Sam, Adam, Adams, Malcolm;  Graham
-n, n, n:  Ben, Nathan, Gavin, Dylan, Oren, Morgan, Gideon,
Damon, Damian; Courtland, Tregowan, Grayson, Clelland  

4.  The real winners combine several velars in first and last
names, with a final syllable in -r or -n:

Mike Flint (k n), Hank Grant (h k g n),  Blake Courtland (k k n),
Hawk Adams (h k m), Cotter Graham (c g m), Jake Tregowan (k g n),
Kyle Hunter (k h r), Parker Sugarman (k r g r n), and of course 

Clark Kent (c k k n) and C. Keesan (c k n) far outclass Kentn and
Carson (k n).

5.  A separate category includes the really descriptive names:
Ben Powell and somebody Powys (bam, pow!)
Hunter Warburton (bang, bang)
Denver Casey (the 'rugged rancher', does he play baseball too?)
Mike Flint (the expressionless?)

Losers' names (these took longer to find in mid-book) 

Ex-husbands Dwyer and Rory, the rats
Ex-lover Tom the tomcat
Stalker Ronny the rapist
Ed the ass (the talking horse?)
Aspiring boyfriend Rod the rude  
Ex-fiance Daniel the dull dentist
And Judd the dudd (Oklahoma)
Note the predominance of dental sounds:  d, t, r, as in Duh/Doh!
dumb, dudd

There is also Bill, who wants his wife to pay the bills.

Heroes are occasionally named Tom, or even Joe, but never Dick or
Harry, or Jim, John, Bob, George, or most other common names.


Heroines

1.  K:  Kelly, Kendra, Kate, Cass, Carrie, Carlie, Nicki
2.  L:  Loren, Lauren, Larissa, Lois Lane
3.  -y, -ie, -i:  Amy, Jeannie, Freddie, Traci, Sally, Brittany,
Carrie, Carlie, Stacey, Dani
(remember Ronny?  Real men's names rarely end in this sound, and
if they do it is spelled -ey:  Stoney, Casey, Garvey).
3.  stressed final syllable:  Christine, Colleen, Chantal
4.  Exotics:  Dulcinea, Phyllida, Tessa, Larissa, Lorena

Femme fatales

Mona - she married for money
Tina - tiny but has claws
Cindy - the sinful cocktail waitress "She asked me out".
Evelyn - the gun-toting villainess (can also be a man's name)

Dull but dead ex-wives
Elizabeth, Janet... (they all have common names)

Do these names actually have an emotional effect upon the reader,
or are they used like the colored masks in Chinese opera, as a
memory aid to clearly label hero and villain?

Are people expected to look or act a certain way, or are they
treated differently because of their names?  Do we have any Jakes
or Lukes?

(Apparently, it was originally "Dough!" in the comic books, but Groenig
switched it to "D'oh!" when he realized nobody else understood it.  I don't
remember where I heard this, though...

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The ending "-y" or "-ie" is often a diminutive -- Jennifer to "Jenny," for
example. You may observe young boys teasing each other by adding the
"-ie" diminutive to each other's names, or how at a certain age, "Timmy"
is no longer an acceptable appellation for a boy.

Jimmie Carter?

There are always exceptions.  Jimmy Carter being from the South might have
something to do with it too, at least judgigng by stereotypical Southern
names.

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Jerry is sometimes given as an official name.  Gerald does not seem to be used
often even by adults.  Also Harry, not Harold.  Gary, Barry.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss