The Words Women Know but Men Don't (and vice versa)

[LoquiSordidaAdMe]

I ran across this article earlier today and thought it might be useful knowledge for women who write from a first-person male perspective or for men who write from a first-person female perspective. It's about the words that most women know but men don't and vice versa.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9/tables/2

So 84% of men know what a howitzer is, while only 53% of women do. But 87% of women know what taffeta is, while only 53% of men do. Huh.

The article itself is pretty dense, but the tables are straight-forward enough. Anyway, I thought this might be helpful to someone. I mostly write first-person, from both female and male perspectives, so I'll be bookmarking this to refer to.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Lol. I knew the meaning of every word except verbena, and now I know that one, too.

According to this, men are mostly electrical/electronic engineers or physicists, and women are dressmakers or gardeners. I sense a skew in the sample pools, both the words to choose from, and the people picked to choose.

 

[windar]

Lol. I knew the meaning of every word except verbena, and now I know that one, too.

According to this, men are mostly electrical/electronic engineers or physicists, and women are dressmakers or gardeners. I sense a skew in the sample pools, both the words to choose from, and the people picked to choose.

Yeah, seriously, if I went out on the street and stopped 100 men and 100 women, I would be surprised if 10 of either sex knew what bushido is or boucle or ruche.

 

[LoquiSordidaAdMe]

According to this, men are mostly electrical/electronic engineers or physicists, and women are dressmakers or gardeners. I sense a skew in the sample pools, both the words to choose from, and the people picked to choose.

Yeah, the skew is kind of the point of the article. Well, that part of it anyway. They found these words to be outliers, so they suggest avoiding their use in future prevalence studies. "...it will be useful to exclude the deviating words..." is their exact conclusion.

The article's observation was "...(games, weapons, and technical matters for males; food, clothing, and flowers for females)."

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I find it plausible enough - even if a particular woman isn't interested in seeing or clothes styles or gardening, the chances are higher that her friends will have told her about such things and she'll have picked some of the words up - ditto with men not into car repair or computers will still likely have heard more about them from their mates or dads than the average woman.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Lol. I knew the meaning of every word except verbena, and now I know that one, too.

According to this, men are mostly electrical/electronic engineers or physicists, and women are dressmakers or gardeners. I sense a skew in the sample pools, both the words to choose from, and the people picked to choose.

I don't think there's necessarily a sample skew, they had a fairly large sample size (220,000 participants) and a possible 62,000 words in the test.

Note that you can do the test yourself with a fresh set of words here: vocabulary.ugent.be/. The test just asks you do you know this word: 'yes' or 'no', but then throws in a bunch of fake non-words to see if you are honest and to make you doubt yourself. There's this grey area where might know that a word is a word, but not know what it means - I got 'bibcock' on my test and was pretty sure it was a word, but had no idea what it actually meant, so had to say no, but there were a few I said yes to being only about 50% certain I knew what they meant.

I think a lot of the words on both male and female list look like they could be made up,（I suppose you could say this for any word if you don't know it, but bear with me...) - femtosecond for example looks like it could be one of those prefix+measurement words, but who knows if femto is actually a thing or not. The female list has a whole bunch of five and six letter words on it that look mostly foreign (mostly French) in origin. Not all women are interested in fashion, but, because they are often thought to be, other women might be more likely to use particular words for fabrics that they might not bother using around men. Similarly we men all have that mate who is just a little bit too much into Japanese culture and who talks about getting his own katana made and the bushido code (but crucially not around women who already find him creepy enough...)

 

[jsmiam]

I find it plausible enough - even if a particular woman isn't interested in seeing or clothes styles or gardening, the chances are higher that her friends will have told her about such things and she'll have picked some of the words up - ditto with men not into car repair or computers will still likely have heard more about them from their mates or dads than the average woman.

In sexual terms, and for my own fraud protection back in aol days from girls with Adam’s apples, was “what’s an applicator”, the usage rather than the dictionary term. Makeup and/or feminine hygiene were both good answers. Few men would know that.

 

[JuanaSalsa]

I think a lot of the words on both male and female list look like they could be made up,（I suppose you could say this for any word if you don't know it, but bear with me...) - femtosecond for example looks like it could be one of those prefix+measurement words, but who knows if femto is actually a thing or not.

Ooh ohh I know what a femtosecond is! I have a femtosecond laser in my lab =]

Oh man, I'm all good on the man words. I have servo motors in my lab too - I wouldn't have thought that was an uncommon word. I work with piezoelectricity all the time, heck I teach people what that word means (it was discovered by the Curie brothers!).

But I know the woman words too, lol. If I hadn't gone into STEM I would have been a fashion designer! Fashion is super fun. I've gotten really lazy with my personal style though.

Oh man jsmiam, I would have said something about using an applicator to place epoxy, lol. I've lost my woman card.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Or "what do you use an applicator for?"

Good filter, though like Juana I'd probably mention a glue gun before remembering tampons. Not sure I'd use the word for make-up but I'd certainly understand it if I heard it.

I'm wondering what question would work for men. In the UK, "what is the offside rule?" is a classic, though many women have memorised it to shut up patronising men who think women cant understand football (it's really not a complex sport...). Perhaps "how long does your morning wood last?"

I did once get asked that by a guy, who was first amazed by my not suffering the problem, then alarmed as I indicated my lack of appropriate genitalia, before blearily remembering that out of the 12 of us on his course who'd all crashed out in the same room, only 11 were men...

 

[jsmiam]

… Oh man jsmiam, I would have said something about using an applicator to place epoxy, lol. I've lost my woman card.

I had follow up questions, if needed. But what made it such a good question is that lots of things have applicators. But when you’re dealing with hot girls who don’t want to waste time, and want to get straight to giving oral and receiving anal in darkened rooms, you expect their minds to be on personal stuff...

Man, I do miss that Pat… and she knew so much about cars, carpentry, and CNC programming! What a lady! ;-)

 

[Lori_the_Hoosier]

When I first started 'taking an interest' in hubby's obsession with crapped-out old rust heaps I was introduced to a whole new, esoteric vocab that I only now understand; words like 'trunnion', 'Pitman arm', 'rumble-seat', 'First-motion shaft', 'planetary gear', 'boxer engine', 'camber', 'castor', 'graunching' were tossed at me until the MEGO (my eyes glaze over) Factor set in. Now I get it, back then it was like a whole new language, a sort of greasy Esperanto that only a few initiates spoke; he could be chatting to my mechanic and I'd lose track of what they were saying inside a minute, tops, all I could glean was that it had something to do with the funny noise coming from somewhere under the driver's seat...