Jespersen decrees that the way women talk is curiously inferior—less masterful, less effective—to that of men. His conclusions include gems like, “Women 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 vocabulary of a woman as a rule is much less extensive than that of a man,” and “The highest linguistic genius and the lowest degree of linguistic imbecility are very rarely found among women. The great orators, the most famous literary artists, have been men.”
