I was watching an episode of “The Pitt.” A father brings his son to the emergency room and begins bragging about his baseball prowess. His son is a pitcher with a fastball, a slider, and a curveball. He tells a nurse that his son has Cy Young-type numbers, and as an added bonus, he’s a southpaw.
The nurse doesn’t understand a single word that the man said. Words like “slider,” “Cy Young,” and even “southpaw” are lost on her.
Understandable if you don’t pay any attention to baseball, but I was also a little amazed. We all speak English and live in the United States, yet this father’s monologue made complete sense to me, while this fictional nurse (and presumably many other people) didn’t understand a word of it.
It got me wondering how much of that dialogue was skewed along gender lines. While I’m absolutely certain that some men would be just as lost as that fictional nurse, and some women would understand every word that was spoken, does sports vocabulary skew towards men, and if so, what words tend to skew female?
Then I found this study on the very topic.
Actually, it conveniently appeared in my inbox.
A 2018 study looked at words that had major differences between the percentage of men and the percentage of women who know them, and a new survey dives deep into the extent to which there’s a gender gap in some vocabulary.
Words disproportionately known by women include chenille (44 percent of women vs 20 percent of men), doula (44 percent vs. 18 percent), tulle (41 percent vs 19 percent), taffeta and sateen (both 37 percent vs. 19 percent), and verbena (36 percent vs. 11 percent).
For the record, I know the definition of all of these words. I’m not sure I could accurately identify taffeta or sateen in the real world (though I know sateen is smooth and taffeta is not), but I understand that they are and could use them accurately in a sentence.
Nor could I accurately identify verbena in a garden, but I know it’s a flower.
Male-skewing words included howitzer (47 percent of men vs 25 percent of women), yakuza (40 percent vs 19 percent), strafe (36 percent vs 18 percent), parsec (30 percent vs 14 percent), and servo (28 percent vs 8 percent).
I know all of those words, too, though I can’t tell you the actual distance of a parsec except to say it’s unimaginably enormous, and I know a servo is a part of a motor, and I know it moves, but that’s the extent of my knowledge.
Frankly, the more interesting part of the study for me was how few people knew the meaning of any of those words. Fewer than 50% of men or women knew the definitions of any of these terms.
That seems disturbingly low.
I suspect it has a lot to do with reading:
The more you read, the more words you know.
Equally important (and often ignored):
The more widely you read, the more words you know.
I met someone recently who proudly told me he had read 77 business books last year.
I was not impressed. Nothing wrong with business books, but how about some poetry, fiction, and memoir, too? Perhaps expand the palate beyond books filled with words like synergy, stakeholders, cross-functional, leverage, and ideate.
If my friend told me he read 77 business books in a year, I’m not sure I would want to keep him as a friend.
I recently referenced Robert Frost’s “Dust of Snow” (I actually recited it), a line from “Hamlet” (“the play’s the thing where I’ll catch the conscience of the king”), and a scene from a Stephen King novel in a corporate storytelling workshop.
At a meeting yesterday, I discussed Angre Agassi’s memoir and pointed someone at Atticus Finch’s courtroom scene (admittedly from the film, though she would’ve read it in the book, too).
You can’t get that from 77 business books.
I also suspect that words like “chenille” and “servo” aren’t popping up in any of these business books, either.
The gender gap is interesting, but the lack of vocabulary is disturbing.
Read. And read widely. As widely as you possibly can.
It’s through the intersection and collision of disparate media and messages that new thoughts and insights are born.
Vocabulary, too.
