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Business school emphasizes a ‘values-based’ curriculum

Thursday, April 22nd, 2004

The Loyola University Graduate School of Business has new billboards around town that read, “We educate values-based leaders.”

As timely as the tagline is in this era of Enron/Tyco corporate scandal, it raises one question: What exactly is a values-based leader?

“Most business schools do an effective job educating students about the technical aspects of business—debits, credits, accounting, supply and demand curves, and so on,” said Robert Parkinson Jr., dean of Loyola’s Graduate School of Business and former president of Abbott Laboratories.

“I’m not sure if business schools do as effective a job of training leaders in the broader context of ethical and socially responsible behavior.”

To describe this goal, Loyola, a Jesuit university, chose “values-based leaders” over “responsible leaders”—which was considered too broad—and “ethical leaders”—too narrow—Parkinson said. The school is counting on common interpretations of the word “values” to get the message across.

“There’s a moral undertone to `values-based leadership,’” says word watcher Paul McFedries, author of “Word Spy” and editor of WordSpy.com. “We’re seeing ‘values’ morphing into the general idea of moral values, probably because people see it as a short form of `family values.’”

Some lexicographers might argue that everyone is “values-based.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines “value” as “a principle, standard or quality considered worthwhile or desirable.” But what people consider desirable can be good or bad.

“What’s important to one person could be many things, not necessarily positive things,” McFedries said. “A business might value the bottom line. If that’s what you value, then the means to get to that end are not necessarily important as long as you reach the thing you value: maximum profit for the shareholder.”

Parkinson said he considered the ambiguity of the word “values,” citing a commencement address by columnist George Will at Lafayette College in 2000. In that speech, Will contended that when people say “values,” they often mean “virtues.” Webster defines “virtue” as “conformity to a standard of right . . . a particular moral excellence.”

But Parkinson didn’t wish to split lexical hairs on his school’s billboards and said using “virtuous” would be “a little self-righteous.”

“I didn’t want the tagline to be `virtuous leaders,’” he said. “The word ‘values’ is more in line with business terminology. . . . Implicit in ‘values’ is good values, not bad. If we were to do market research on this, I would be shocked if less than 99 percent of respondents didn’t associate something positive with that.”

Talk of “values” is hardly restricted to the world of business. With the election season under way, “`moral values’ is going to be on everyone’s lips,” McFedries said.

So will the phrase “family values”—it’s hard to locate a candidate who says he or she doesn’t value family life.

“Values” is also unavoidable in sports, though it can serve as a source of irony. This month’s telecast of The Masters golf championship included a public service spot for First Tee, a non-profit organization that introduces golf to youth. In the spot, a mother reported that golf is “teaching my daughter important values.”

But at Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts The Masters, those values do not include welcoming female golfers as members. To fend off protests aimed at advertisers over that policy, CBS and Augusta National made this the second year in a row the tournament was commercial—free save for that First Tee spot and its message about “values.”

Endings

  • Activists succeeded earlier this month in blocking Wal-Mart’s
    expansion into Inglewood, Calif., despite some ambiguous campaign buttons.
    The
    buttons bore the words “Stop Wal-Mart!” underneath a red circle with a
    slash
    through it, literally urging readers to oppose efforts to stop Wal-Mart .
    . .
  • Monthly visitation to Congaree Swamp National Monument near Columbia,S.C.,
    has
    more than doubled since the site dropped “Swamp,” The New York Times
    reports.Last November, President Bush authorized changing the park’s name to
    Congaree
    National Park. . . .
  • “Wardrobe malfunction” was the top “HollyWord” in
    terms
    of its impact on the English language over the last 12 months, according
    to
    the word-tracking Web site Global Language Monitor (languagemonitor.com).

‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves’ takes on poor punctuation

Thursday, April 8th, 2004

Centuries ago, the word “stickler” meant the judge of a duel who made sure all the rules were obeyed. To author Lynne Truss, those were the good old days. At least people listened to that kind of stickler.

“I think the role of the stickler these days has dwindled to that of enraged observer,” she said in an interview. “Sticklers of my sort have no authority!”

Truss has tried to change that with her book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” which became an unexpected best seller in Britain and will be released in North America by Gotham Books.

“Sticklers, unite!” is her book’s rallying cry. “Some of us were born to be punctuation vigilantes,” she writes but adds that everyone can “unleash your Inner Stickler.”

Do you doubt the importance of punctuation? Consider the example Truss takes from a popular e-mail that has been widely forwarded: With just a few strokes of a pen or keyboard, the statement “A woman, without her man, is nothing” becomes “A woman: without her, man is nothing.” Or take Truss’ title, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves.” Without the comma, the book’s back cover explains, the phrase describes a panda’s diet. With the comma, it reports armed assault in a deli.

“Punctuation herds words together, keeps others apart,” Truss writes. “The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it, there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.”

Truss samples some popular analogies about punctuation. Punctuation marks are the stitches of language that hold it together, or the traffic signals that tell us where to go.

Punctuation is also like good manners. “Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves,” Truss writes. “It is no accident that the word `punctilious’ (`attentive to formality or etiquette’) comes from the same original root word as punctuation.”

Violation of this etiquette can summon an alarming amount of rage in sticklers. When Truss says that committing the cardinal sin of writing “it’s” as a possessive is cause for the offender “to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave,” it is reassuring to see that the publisher lists the book in the unique category of “reference/humour.”

Despite the fierceness of her defense, Truss acknowledges that punctuation is a relatively recent invention. For much of the history of writing, Truss says, punctuation was spare; in plays or texts to be read aloud, a few rudimentary marks were inserted to tell actors or readers where to breathe. With the rise of printing came the need for a standard system of marks.

Truss celebrates the 15th Century printer Aldus Manutius, who is generally credited with developing the modern comma and semicolon and inaugurating the period.

Truss takes the major punctuation marks one by one (she spends a chapter each on the comma, the apostrophe and the hyphen), listing rules of usage and adding examples and anecdotes. Her sources vary, from the 16th Century printer who tried to introduce the reverse question mark for rhetorical questions, to Virginia Woolf, who used five semicolons in one sentence in “Mrs. Dalloway,” to the British child who defended putting everything he wrote in quotation marks, since, after all, “it’s all me talking.”

Despite Truss’ pledge to take a zero-tolerance approach to punctuation, she allows for some subjectivity, respecting linguist G.V. Carey’s rule that punctuation proceed “two-thirds by rule and one-third by personal taste.”

Truss’ own British spellings and punctuation style (such as putting a closing quotation mark before the period rather than after it) call attention to the elasticity of punctuation standards. Gotham Books decided not to revise the book according to American spelling and style.

“We were so taken with the book as it was, so much of the wit and charm of it was very British,” said William Shinker, Gotham’s senior vice president and publisher. “If you Americanize it, it would just have ruined the tone of the book.”

While punctuation is ever evolving, the Internet and instant messaging have made punctuation appreciation an urgent cause, Truss said in an interview.

“People are writing much, much more than they used to do, and writing publicly,” she said. “So much editing used to go on that’s been thrown away. People write directly into the medium.” As a result, she said, “language is losing a lot of its charm, a lot of its subtlety, a lot of its meaning.”

Linguists hunt and study words in their natural habitat

Thursday, March 25th, 2004

Sometimes language lovers sound as if they’re on a safari. They talk about observing words in their natural habitat and studying their behavior in herds.

With the first release of the American National Corpus, an annotated body of over 10 million words, linguists can hunt like never before.

“Up until now, linguists were kind of like Victorian bug hunters,” says Erin McKean, the Chicago-based senior editor of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press and board member of the American National Corpus. “We’d go out with our nets and we’d catch some butterflies and we’d chloroform them and pin them to cards and put them in a drawer.”

“But now, when people are really studying an ecosystem—and English is like an ecosystem—what they do is, they take a representative square area and report everything that’s there: every bug, every plant, every leaf,” she said.
“And now with the corpus, we can do that for English.”

If the dictionary is like the drawer with bugs on cards, the corpus is the jungle. The ANC collects blocks of text from newspapers, books and conversations so words and phrases can be viewed in their natural habitat—that is, in an American English context.

Readers can search the collection by word, phrase, part of speech or type of source and find their quarry used in a sentence or paragraph.

For students learning English as a second language, a corpus—from the Latin word for “body”—can help teach idioms and tendencies in a way dictionaries cannot, as ANC users around the world have already discovered.

“I hear from language teacher trainers in Egypt, Germany, Japan and Sweden who are really excited to have these data available to them, so they can go in and look at aspects of conversation,” said Randi Reppen, English professor at Northern Arizona University and Project Manager for the ANC.

The ANC could also be used by advertising copywriters in search of resonant slogans, or by computer programmers to make automated customer service hotlines sound more natural, McKean said.

The ANC’s initial release last October, available on CD-ROM for $75 at www.americannationalcorpus.org, contains 11.5 million words. About one-fourth of the collection is made up of spoken English, including transcribed phone conversations from volunteers who were given phone cards in exchange for being recorded.

The rest of the corpus is written text contributed by The New York Times, the online magazine Slate, Langenscheidt travel guides and books from Oxford University Press on architecture and Abraham Lincoln.

“We want writers to want to be part of the American National Corpus,” McKean said. “We’re hoping to have an ANC logo that authors can have their publishers put on their books, as a way of saying, `My work is influencing the study of the English language.’”

By the end of 2005, the ANC, which last year received a grant from the National Science Foundation, hopes to release 100 million words — 90 million written, 10 million spoken — evenly balanced among sources as diverse as town meetings, medical journals and novels.

“It’s hard to take one area and say, `This is English,’” Reppen said. “By having different types of writing and speaking situations, the corpus gives a better picture for language researchers, teachers and learners.”

Until now, such seekers of untamed English have relied on other corpora such as the British National Corpus, a collection of 100 million words of British English released 10 years ago. But in the last 10 years, new technology has made formatting samples of text faster and cheaper.

“We’re lucky that we’re doing it today,” McKean said. “This is something that would have been insane to do in the 1950s and was barely possible in the 1980s when the British National Corpus [started].”

Meanwhile, demand for corpora has grown in the field of computational linguistics, which uses computer programs to analyze the structure of language.

“The motivation for the ANC came from the fact that many computational linguists were using the BNC to gather statistics about
syntactic patterns, [when in fact] British English and American English are not alike in several ways,” said Nancy Ide, professor of computer science at Vassar College and Technical Director of the ANC.

Another new wrinkle in corpus linguistics is the Internet. The ANC plans to add e-mails, message boards and Web sites to its collection. McKean has already gotten permission from her message board of fellow “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” fans to use their posts for the ANC.

Once again without feeling: Athletic cliches a team effort

Thursday, March 18th, 2004

It’s the season of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, and, as they inevitably say, you can throw the records out the window. And the mathematics. Over the next three weeks, in pregame pep talks and postgame press conferences, players and coaches will repeatedly make the math-defying pledge to give 110 percent and offer up boundless other basketball banalities.

“If anybody watches 10 seconds of sports on TV or reads anything between quotation marks in the paper, it’s almost all cliches,” says Steve Rushin, who writes the weekly “Air and Space” column for Sports Illustrated. “We all know those ready-made phrases so well you can almost predict them before they come out of someone’s mouth: `It was a team effort; we gave 110 percent.’”

In 2000, Rushin wrote a column composed entirely of cliches (deliberately, he hastens to note).

“Men, if we play our game, bring our `A’ game, take it one game at a time, stick to the game plan, stay within ourselves, dictate the tempo . . . step up our intensity, execute, focus, convert and leave it all on the floor, it’s anybody’s ball game,” Rushin wrote. “But there’s no tomorrow, our backs are against the wall, it’s crunch time, gut-check time, do or die. . . . We’ll need good chemistry, and you can’t teach that.”

Last year, Rushin wrote a column comparing television coverage of the NCAA tournament with coinciding coverage of the invasion of Iraq, noting how overwrought the militaristic jargon of basketball seemed.

“The cataclysmic and the inconsequential sounded almost identical,” Rushin wrote. “Said [one player], after his team’s not-quite-epic victory, `It was a war out there.’”

But if reporters tire of the blather of athletes, they should watch their own jargon, Rushin said in an interview.

“Many athletes, sportswriters and fans really do think that way, because they’re conditioned to think that way,” he said. “When a player is asked repeatedly about the chemistry of the team, nobody would naturally think of a team as having chemistry unless they had heard that so many times.”

“Coaches have been living inside of this rhetoric their entire lives, since the time they started playing basketball in junior high,” said David Shields, who spent a season covering the NBA’s Seattle SuperSonics for his book “Black Planet: Facing Race in an NBA Season” (Three Rivers Press, 240 pages). “After a while their language becomes reality, and they have no way to see outside of that. It’s never acknowledged that it’s just a game, the result of which carries no larger meaning.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “cliche” as “a stereotyped expression, a commonplace phrase.” The word is derived from a French term for a printer’s template.

As pretentious as they may sound, cliches sometimes serve as a defense mechanism for players in the glare of the media, Shields said.

“It’s a way to let no feeling come into the mix,” said Shields, whose forthcoming book is titled “Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine.” “By presenting bland language to you, it makes sure you can never penetrate my inner being. . . . There’s actually very little communication going on.”

As a result, hollow statements preserve the mythic quality of athletic feats, Shields said.

“The words tell you nothing, so the deeds stay magical,” he said. “If the words started to become beautiful, interesting and dense, we would say, wait a minute, that’s a complete human being who really does get nervous at the plate.”

Though emptied of significance by their overuse and hyperbole, cliches can be succinct and rhythmic, especially in basketball. “Take it to the hole,” “crash the boards,” and “nothing but net” all hit the ear in a way that “make a basket” does not.

“When you put them all together they take on [the quality] of a mad poetry,” Shields said. “The reason they have become part of the vernacular is that they’re weirdly evocative.”

“Most cliches became cliches because they were colorful phrases in the first place, and people wanted to use them.” Rushin said. “The first person who said, `We were backed into a corner but came out swinging,’ was being very colorful.”

“Sometimes athletes can go on in Shakespearean soliloquies entirely in cliches,” Rushin said. “By writing a column in cliches, I was trying to elevate cliches to a perverse art form.”

’60s American culture altered communication

Thursday, March 11th, 2004

When did the term “rhetoric” become an insult? When did the word cease to mean artfully crafted speech and start to convey scorn, as it does when we hear a campaign speech and mutter, “That’s just rhetoric”?

The answer is 1965, says John McWhorter in his recent book, “Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care” (Gotham Books, 279 pages, $26).

That happened to be the year McWhorter was born and the year color television began to elevate the visual over the written in American culture.

What’s more, 1965—the year the first American combat troops were sent to Vietnam—also marked the era when trust in government began a plunge that would last the rest of the century and ruin the reputation of oratory.

But the ’60s also marked a more subtle and profound shift in American culture that altered the way we communicate, says McWhorter, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Not only did we come to regard political speech as manipulative, but we started to see formality in general as old-fashioned and insincere. The culture that bred casual Fridays and microwave dinners came to value “doing your own thing” over older standards of propriety, and this attitude has shaped our language, McWhorter says.

McWhorter is not your typical prophet of doom for formal English. In an earlier book, “Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a `Pure’ Standard English,” (Perseus Publishing, 300 pages, $17.50) he argued that harrumphing about proper grammar is an ill-conceived effort to enforce the arbitrary rules imposed by long-dead scholars.

In its purest form, he maintains, human communication is oral and always changing—a point he revisits in his new book. He is interested in graceful and artful English, not `proper’ English, he says.

Certainly, Americans, in what McWhorter calls `post-oratorical America,’ do not speak and write as formally and decoratively as they did in the most ordinary conversations a century ago.

At the time of the Civil War, even the least educated, teenage soldiers writing letters or diaries were penning beautiful prose. McWhorter quotes the love letter of a 19-year-old store clerk in the 1830s who wishes to seize the day since “At best we live but one little hour, strut at our own conceit, and die.”

Try sending that kind of prose out in an e-mail today, and your sweetheart will quickly hit the delete button. “What gave us Americans a tacit sense that to wield the full resources of our native language is tacky?” McWhorter wonders in his book.

The result of our culture of informality is not only more ordinary English, but also muddier public discourse, McWhorter says in an interview by telephone.

“It can impede the development of precise thinking,” he says. “The most worrisome thing about this development is that it eliminates the space in the culture for speeches and addresses that make a careful, logical case for a point of view.”

Not that the change has been entirely harmful, McWhorter points out.

The ornate English that has fallen out of regular use, he says, “could be the vehicle of sophisticated argument, or it could be a wonderful way to say nothing at all.”

“Change is heartening in as many ways as it is sad,” McWhorter says. “I’m not a nostalgic person to any great extent.” He calls his book “an anthropological description.”

McWhorter says the triumph of the casual in American life was inevitable, but he suggests that artful English could have gone the way of good cooking—which we continue to appreciate, if not always practice.

Instead, McWhorter says, “We do not see English as worthy of that kind of loving, artful attention.”

The Jesuit Scholar Who Translated ‘The Passion’

Thursday, March 4th, 2004

Obscured by the furor surrounding Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” is one relatively mundane bit of trivia: Last week’s debut marked the widest release ever of a subtitled film in North America. The subtitles were actually Plan B. Gibson originally intended to show the movie without them, letting the sound of the Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin—not to mention the spattering blood—speak for itself.

“He was real hard-set against them,” said Alan Nierob, Gibson’s publicist. “He initially thought they would be a distraction. . . . It’s a very visual movie.”

Gibson also wanted to avoid the phony air of British English that has plagued so many film renditions of the life of Jesus Christ, Nierob said.

But after early screenings of the film without subtitles, Gibson decided to insert them for the sake of clarity.

“I’m glad he did,” Nierob said. “It is a better movie with them. I’ve seen it both ways, and it’s great [either way], but it’s much better with subtitles, I felt.”

The task of achieving linguistic authenticity fell to Rev. William Fulco, a Jesuit priest and professor of ancient Mediterranean studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Gibson got Fulco’s name from Yale University, where Fulco received a doctorate and taught Aramaic.

“I got a call while I was in Jerusalem: ‘Hey, Padre, It’s Mel, I got a job for you,’” Fulco said. “I said, `Mel who?’ We talked for about an hour. He told me about the project, and I couldn’t pass it up.”

In 2002, Gibson gave Fulco the script written by Benedict Fitzgerald, mostly derived from the Gospels, and asked Fulco to translate it into Aramaic , Hebrew and Latin. Fulco later translated the script back into English subtitles.

The use of multiple languages in the film reflects the linguistic diversity of Palestine during Jesus’ life. Most people spoke Aramaic, which the Jews adopted while exiled in Babylon in the 6th Century before Jesus’ birth. Hebrew, their language before the exile, was retained in religious writings and liturgy (and is spoken by Jesus in prayer in “The Passion”). Latin was spoken by the Roman soldiers occupying the region. Greek was spoken throughout the Roman Empire, thanks to Alexander the Great, but was seen as a sign of secularization and thus resisted by many Jews.

Fulco left Greek out of “The Passion,” substituting Latin in occasional cases where Greek might have been used. He also made mostly imperceptible distinctions between the elegant Latin of Pilate and the crude Latin of soldiers, thanks to an X-rated source he found on his shelf.

“I tracked down some obscene graffiti from Roman army camps,” Fulco said. “Somebody who knows Latin really well, their ears will fall off. We didn’t subtitle those words.”

Fulco even confessed to some linguistic mischief.

“Here and there I put in playful things which nobody will know. There’s one scene where Caiaphas turns to his cohorts and says something in Aramaic. The subtitle says, `You take care of it.’ He’s actually saying, `Take care of my laundry.’”

Other linguistic tricks of Fulco’s serve a function in the script.

For example, he incorporated deliberate dialogue errors in the scenes where the Roman soldiers, speaking Aramaic, are shouting to Jewish crowds, who respond in Latin. To illustrate the groups’ inability to communicate with each other, each side speaks with incorrect pronunciations and word endings.

Later, “there’s an exchange where Pilate addresses Jesus in Aramaic, and Jesus answers in Latin. It’s kind of a nifty little symbolic thing: Jesus is going to beat him at his own game,” Fulco said. “One line [in that exchange] I kind of enjoyed is when Jesus says, `My power is given from above, otherwise my followers would not have allowed this.’ That’s [spoken in] the pluperfect subjunctive.”

It takes a linguist to appreciate that grammatical nicety as remarkable for being uttered by a Palestinian Jew who mostly spoke Aramaic and Greek.

For the relatively few Middle Eastern Christians who still speak Aramaic, “The Passion” may sound riddled with mistakes—spurring Fulco to point out, “modern Aramaic dialects are as different [from ancient ones] as Chaucer and modern English.”

Still, now that the movie is in general release, Fulco fully expects to get an earful about his use of languages.

“We linguists are a crazy bunch,” he said. “The more obscure the language, the more people try to prove their territory worthwhile and say, by God, we’re going to sniff out errors.”

‘Sex and the City’ redefined the way women talk on TV

Thursday, February 26th, 2004

As “Sex and the City” reached its series finale Sunday, eulogists duly examined the mark it made on popular culture, from its snazzy shoes and outfits to its portrayal of single women. But few paused to note another aspect of the show’s legacy: its language.

Its adult language, to be exact.

If “fabulous” was one of the most recurring words on the show, so was a shorter word beginning with the same letter.

In fact, “Sex and the City” was the first major television show to feature female characters regularly—and blithely—using what comedian George Carlin identified in a controversial 1973 routine as the seven words you can’t say on television. They also added a few.

“I think it was very liberating to hear women using the language that was previously reserved for men’s locker rooms—Samantha more so than the other characters,” said Cindy Chupack, writer and executive producer for “Sex and the City.”

“I don’t think that was the point of the show, but it was an aspect of it … Sarah Jessica [Parker, who played Carrie] would kind of wince once in a while at the table.”

While crude dialogue often serves to darken the mood of a script, in the case of “Sex and the City” it punctuated typically upbeat storytelling amid bright sets and chipper conversations, often over breakfast.

During one meal, Samantha finishes Charlotte’s sentences with sexually explicit talk, prompting Carrie to ask, “What is this, dirty mad libs?”

Over another, the women (well, all except Samantha) worry about their vocabulary in the presence of Miranda’s new baby.

“Originally we were criticized: `Women don’t talk like that,’” said Chupack, who noted that the show’s residency on subscriber cable and lack of sponsors gave it more leeway with language. “Our rule in the writers’ room was, Do women think like that?”

Chupack added that whether her staff was writing dialogue or coining catchphrases such as “secret single behavior,” “goodie drawer,” “sim-u-date” or “gay-straight” and “straight-gay” (long before “metrosexual” was in vogue, she proudly notes), the goal was the same: to give women a voice about their experiences in relationships.

“We wanted to put out in the universe things that women were thinking but didn’t have the courage to say out loud,” said Jenny Bicks, who wrote for “Sex and the City” since the first season.

For better or worse, this marks a change, said Alice Eagly, a psychology professor at Northwestern University who is co-writing a book on gender and leadership.

“Women using forbidden words is just another sign of gender equalization, which has generally taken the form so far of women taking on masculine behavior patterns—the bad ones along with the good ones,” she said.

In her book “Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender and Culture,” Julia Wood notes that a male typically is the subject and a woman the direct object of expressions describing sexual behavior: he is the actor, she is acted upon.

“Language in media and everyday conversation reflects social views of women as more passive than men in relationship contexts,” Wood writes.

But not on “Sex and the City,” where the women clearly described and discussed themselves in terms that were anything but passive. Bicks said the “Sex and the City” writers sensed the fine line between dialogue that is empowering and language that is degrading. She emphasized they created a show that was character-driven and tried to avoid gratuitous use of nudity and adult language.

“We wouldn’t define what we were doing as vulgar. We would define it as honest,” said Bicks.

“We never did something for vulgarity’s sake. If it was vulgar, we didn’t do our job.”

But society often has different definitions of what is vulgar for a man to say versus what is vulgar for a woman to say, Eagly said.

“It used to be [assumed] that men were interested in sex and women weren’t, and so men could use [vulgar or obscene] words … and women couldn’t,” Eagly said. “It is progress to get rid of that sexual double standard.

“It’s another question whether people [in general] should talk like that,” she added. “But we shouldn’t say that women shouldn’t talk like that.”

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