While there are a few adjectives, such as pretty and nice, that might be mentioned as used more extensively by women than by men, there are greater differences with regard to adverbs. Lord Chesterfield wrote (The World, December 5, 1754): “Not contented with enriching our language by words absolutely new, my fair countrywomen have gone still farther, and improved it by the application and extension of old ones to various and very different significations. They take a word and change it, like a guinea into shillings for pocket-money, to be employed in the several occasional purposes of the day. For instance, the adjective vast and its adverb vastly mean anything, and are the fashionable words of the most fashionable people. A fine woman ... is vastly obliged, or vastly offended, vastly glad, or vastly sorry. Large objects are vastly great, small ones are vastly little; and I had lately the pleasure to hear a fine woman pronounce, by a happy metonymy, a very small gold snuff-box, that was produced in company, to be vastly pretty, because it was so vastly little.” Even if that particular adverb to which Lord Chesterfield objected has now to a great extent gone out of fashion, there is no doubt that he has here touched on a distinctive trait: the fondness of women for hyperbole will very often lead the fashion with regard to adverbs of intensity, and these are very often used with disregard of their proper meaning, as in German riesig klein, English awfully pretty, terribly nice, French rudement joli, affreusement délicieux, Danish rædsom morsom (horribly amusing), Russian strast’ kakoy lovkiy (terribly able), etc. Quite, also, in the sense of ‘very,’ as in ‘she was quite charming; it makes me quite angry,’ is, according to Fitzedward Hall, due to the ladies. And I suspect that just sweet (as in Barrie: “Grizel thought it was just sweet of him”) is equally characteristic of the usage of the fair sex.
There is another intensive which has also something of the eternally feminine about it, namely so. I am indebted to Stoffel (Int. 101) for the following quotation from Punch (January 4, 1896): “This little adverb is a great favourite with ladies, in conjunction with an adjective. For instance, they are very fond of using such expressions as ‘He is so charming!’ ‘It is so lovely!’ etc.” Stoffel adds the following instances of strongly intensive so as highly characteristic of ladies’ usage: ‘Thank you so much!’ ‘It was so kind of you to think of it!’ ‘That’s so like you!’ ‘I’m so glad you’ve come!’ ‘The bonnet is so lovely!’
The explanation of this characteristic feminine usage is, I think, that women much more often than men break off without finishing their sentences, because they start talking without having thought out what they are going to say; the sentence ‘I’m so glad you’ve come’ really requires some complement in the shape of a clause with that, ‘so glad that I really must kiss you,’ or, ‘so glad that I must treat you to something extra,’ or whatever the consequence may be. But very often it is difficult in a hurry to hit upon something adequate to say, and ‘so glad that I cannot express it’ frequently results in the inexpressible remaining unexpressed, and when that experiment has been repeated time after time, the linguistic consequence is that a strongly stressed so acquires the force of ‘very much indeed.’ It is the same with such, as in the following two extracts from a modern novel (in both it is a lady who is speaking): “Poor Kitty! she has been in such a state of mind,” and “Do you know that you look such a duck this afternoon.... This hat suits you so—you are such a grande dame in it.” Exactly the same thing has happened with Danish så and sådan, G. so and solch; also with French tellement, though there perhaps not to the same extent as in English.
We have the same phenomenon with to a degree, which properly requires to be supplemented with something that tells us what the degree is, but is frequently left by itself, as in ‘His second marriage was irregular to a degree.’
XIII.—§ 10. Periods.
The frequency with which women thus leave their exclamatory sentences half-finished might be exemplified from many passages in our novelists and dramatists. I select a few quotations. The first is from the beginning of Vanity Fair: “This almost caused Jemima to faint with terror. ‘Well, I never,’ said she. ‘What an audacious’—emotion prevented her from completing either sentence.” Next from one of Hankin’s plays. “Mrs. Eversleigh: I must say! (but words fail her).” And finally from Compton Mackenzie’s Poor Relations: “‘The trouble you must have taken,’ Hilda exclaimed.” These quotations illustrate types of sentences which are becoming so frequent that they would seem soon to deserve a separate chapter in modern grammars, ‘Did you ever?’ ‘Well, I never!’ being perhaps the most important of these ‘stop-short’ or ‘pull-up’ sentences, as I think they might be termed.
These sentences are the linguistic symptoms of a peculiarity of feminine psychology which has not escaped observation. Meredith says of one of his heroines: “She thought in blanks, as girls do, and some women,” and Hardy singularizes one of his by calling her “that novelty among women—one who finished a thought before beginning the sentence which was to convey it.”
The same point is seen in the typical way in which the two sexes build up their sentences and periods; but here, as so often in this chapter, we cannot establish absolute differences, but only preferences that may be broken in a great many instances and yet are characteristic of the sexes as such. If we compare long periods as constructed by men and by women, we shall in the former find many more instances of intricate or involute structures with clause within clause, a relative clause in the middle of a conditional clause or vice versa, with subordination and sub-subordination, while the typical form of long feminine periods is that of co-ordination, one sentence or clause being added to another on the same plane and the gradation between the respective ideas being marked not grammatically, but emotionally, by stress and intonation, and in writing by underlining. In learned terminology we may say that men are fond of hypotaxis and women of parataxis. Or we may use the simile that a male period is often like a set of Chinese boxes, one within another, while a feminine period is like a set of pearls joined together on a string of ands and similar words. In a Danish comedy a young girl is relating what has happened to her at a ball, when she is suddenly interrupted by her brother, who has slyly taken out his watch and now exclaims: “I declare! you have said and then fifteen times in less than two and a half minutes.”
XIII.—§ 11. General Characteristics.
The greater rapidity of female thought is shown linguistically, among other things, by the frequency with which a woman will use a pronoun like he or she, not of the person last mentioned, but of somebody else to whom her thoughts have already wandered, while a man with his slower intellect will think that she is still moving on the same path. The difference in rapidity of perception has been tested experimentally by Romanes: the same paragraph was presented to various well-educated persons, who were asked to read it as rapidly as they could, ten seconds being allowed for twenty lines. As soon as the time was up the paragraph was removed, and the reader immediately wrote down all that he or she could remember of it. It was found that women were usually more successful than men in this test. Not only were they able to read more quickly than the men, but they were able to give a better account of the paragraph as a whole. One lady, for instance, could read exactly four times as fast as her husband, and even then give a better account than he of that small portion of the paragraph he had alone been able to read. But it was found that this rapidity was no proof of intellectual power, and some of the slowest readers were highly distinguished men. Ellis (Man and W. 195) explains this in this way: with the quick reader it is as though every statement were admitted immediately and without inspection to fill the vacant chambers of the mind, while with the slow reader every statement undergoes an instinctive process of cross-examination; every new fact seems to stir up the accumulated stores of facts among which it intrudes, and so impedes rapidity of mental action.