Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Another cartoon for the weekend: a Zits on communication hang ups:

Here, the person doing the talking is female and the person (apparently) not listening is male, and this configuration is conventionally associated with communication hangups, especially (but not only) in mixed-gender couples; “he just doesn’t listen to me”, the women complain. (In real life, you can sometimes find male couples where one man — or each man — complains about the other.)

But in the cartoon the person doing the talking is also a parent and the person (apparently) not listening a teenage child, and this configuration too is conventionally associated with communication hangups.

Put the two conventional associations together, and you get an especially potent combination of beliefs, that teenage boys just pay no attention to what their mothers are saying.

This entry was posted on April 30, 2010 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Language and gender, Language of teenagers, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.