Women speak a language without nouns

I came across a quote attributed to C.S. Lewis.

The cardinal difficulty in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns.

First was my visceral response to the idea. What an absurd thing to say. What does it even mean? But also, what an intriguing notion. A language without nouns?

Second was doubt that he said it. And in a way, he did not. It is from a dialogue in That Hideous Strength.

"The cardinal difficulty," said MacPhee, "in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, 'Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you'll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.' The female for this is, 'Put that in the other one in there.' And then if you ask them, 'in where?' they say, 'in there, of course.' There is consequently a phatic hiatus."

OK. Now I understand what he means about speaking without nouns.

Now I veer from "that's unprovably absurd" to "there seems to be an unprovable truth in there and I can't put my finger on it."

I have noticed in the past a pattern of a casual conversational indifference to specificity among particular friends or family members but had never noted that it does seem more prevalent among female friends and family (though, of course not exclusive by any means). I never paid it much attention and to the extent that I did, I noticed it as an individual idiosyncrasy not something that generalized by any variable such as gender. And I don't think it ever occurred to me that the lack of specificity was due to an absence of nouns.

Lewis has now planted the idea. I still remain skeptical that it is true but it is a tar-baby idea. You just want to get up close and prod it.

Should be testable. We have lots of corpi of conversation and can identify speakers by gender. Perhaps someone will investigate one day.

Well, damn it. They already have. No sooner asked than answered. I thought it so absurd a notion, I almost skipped googling. Lucky I did.

In written form and spoken, it appears men do use more nouns than women.

Gender Differences in Vocabulary Use in Essay Writing by Yuka Ishikawa.

The results of the study presented here indicate that there are indeed gender differences in language use in essay writing, suggesting that male students tend to use more nouns related to social economic activities to convey information or facts about the given topics, whereas female students tend to use more pronouns, more intensifiers and modifiers, and words related to psychological cognitive processes so that they might convey their feelings and develop a good relationship with other people.

Gender Difference in the Use of Noun Concept Categories A Statistical Study Based on Data from Child Language Acquisition by Velina Slavova, Dimitar V Atanasov, and Filip Andonov.

The statistical analysis of the progressive use of nouns from the proposed categories shows a coincidence with a wide range of theories of gender differences. From our data, it is not possible to distinguish between learned gender aptitudes and innate preferences. However, our statistical result supports the idea that gender distinctions may date to early human history.

Translation - Boys use more nouns than girls and it is not clear whether that it is evolutionary biology or socialization but it seems it might be innate.

Gender Differences in Language Use: An Analysis of 14,000 Text Samples by Matthew L. Newman, Carla J. Groom, Lori D. Handelman, and James W. Pennebaker.

Differences in the ways that men and women use language have long been of interest in the study of discourse. Despite extensive theorizing, actual empirical investigations have yet to converge on a coherent picture of gender differences in language. A significant reason is the lack of agreement over the best way to analyze language. In this research, gender differences in language use were examined using standardized categories to analyze a database of over 14,000 text files from 70 separate studies. Women used more words related to psychological and social processes. Men referred more to object properties and impersonal topics. Although these effects were largely consistent across different contexts, the pattern of variation suggests that gender differences are larger on tasks that place fewer constraints on language use.

I.e. men use more nouns.

Googling turns up a lot of gender-theory twaddle which obscures the underlying linguistic research but it seems that this is actually pretty well studied.

I have to noodle on that. Oh, and I love that "a phatic hiatus", a cessation in conversational chit chat.