When people realize that in the long run you may be turning off the audiences more, even though they will look temporarily--in the end they turn away, we really need to develop other metaphors and not talk about two sides, but talk about all sides.
More Quotes from Deborah Tannen:
Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations.Deborah Tannen
It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.
Deborah Tannen
Many of us dismiss talk that does not convey important information as worthless - meaningless small talk if it's a social setting or empty rhetoric if it's public. Such admonitions as Skip the small talk, Get to the point, or Why don't you say what you mean may seem to be reasonable. But they are reasonable only if information is all that counts. This attitude toward talk ignores the fact that people are emotionally involved with each other and that talking is the major way be establish, maintain, monitor and adjust our relationships.
Deborah Tannen
We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.
Deborah Tannen
The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation - or a relationship.
Deborah Tannen
Part of the reason (motherly advice) bugs us as daughters is because our mothers are so powerful in our lives. They loom like giants. The reason mothers keep at it is because they're so powerless. They cannot get you to do what is so obvious to them you should do.
Deborah Tannen
Readers Who Like This Quotation Also Like:
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.Paul Auster
The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.
Donald Knuth
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
Cyril Connolly