We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.

Each underestimates her own power and overestimates the other's.

The study of gender and language might seem at first to be a narrowly focused field, but it is actually as interdisciplinary as they come.

For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.

Where the daughter sees power, the mother feels powerless. Daughters and mothers, I found, both overestimate the other's power - and underestimate their own.

One of the nice things about the United States is that, wherever you go, people speak the same language. So native New Yorkers can move to San Francisco, Houston, or Milwaukee and still understand and be understood by everyone they meet. Right? Well, not exactly. Or, as a native New Yorker might put it, 'Wrong!'