Women Have To Appropriate The Language Of Men To Get On In The World

In this day and age you would think that people would've stopped nitpicking at every thing women do and accept that, really, we are just as powerful as men and how we speak doesn't affect that. But it apparently it isn't as simple as I just stated it to be, because just the other day I read an article which addressed the way women speak and concluded that "women have to appropriate the language of men to get on in the world". Now, if you ask me, 'getting on in the world' has nothing to do with the way women speak, but is more to do with status, respectability and hard work. As part of the Diversity Model, O'Barr and Atkins studied courtroom cases and found that speech patterns previously proposed by Lakoff to be typical female speech patterns, were used just as equally by men and more related to being powerless speech than being female speech. This study alone is a hard piece of evidence suggesting that powerful speech is not simply an extension on male speech, but a separate type of speech used by both men and women which changes depending on the situation you are. For example, in some work places it is just not appropriate to use 'stereotypical' powerful language (i.e the typical 'you MUST do this', 'get back to me ASAP', no pleases, no thank yous, just orders, orders and more orders.) but in fact it would be more effective to suggest that something should be done, or ask politely for some work to be done at some point in the day. Because I don't know about you, but the people in my life who I see as powerful are the people I respect, and if someone demands I do something without a single please or thank you, then there is absolutely no way that they are gaining a single ounce of my respect (as you have probably guessed by now, politeness is a key factor for me and by far one of the most important qualities I look for in people). I understand that in some cases stereotypical powerful language has to be used, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's men's language.