Welcome to Let It Be Easy with Susie Moore.

Years ago when I was studying linguistics, one of the many thought leaders on the subject

said that communication between men and women is actually what he deemed cross-cultural communication.

I thought that was very interesting for context or for an example, what he meant by that was when a woman is speaking,

perhaps she's complaining.

A man typically wants to go straight in and solve the problem. Whereas the woman just

wants to talk it out, the process typically the thinking through comes from the

speaking and we don't want solutions. Maybe at all or definitely at least not right away, but the male inclination is to swoop on in and problem solve.

Also when a man is speaking the research suggested that when a

woman is just nodding showing that she's listening the man assumes that

she's agreeing with him. So for example if a man is saying

something like the car sucks this is wrong that's wrong and the woman's

nodding along he's thinking oh so you agree with me that we need a new car.

And he might be shocked when the woman says, no, I never said that.

Hence the cross-cultural communication, we just communicate differently. But one thing that stood out in this

linguistics essay was the tag question. I'm going to explain what that is in a second.

But there are two very different arguments about what the tag question means and

linguists debate over this. I love a good debate, especially over anything to do with language.

So a tag question is is as follows. It's as if I say to you, I think that's the right color, don't you?

That decision we made last year to XYZ was correct, wasn't it?

I think we should move forward in the second quarter with this choice.

Wouldn't you agree?

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