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Was that the sound of our meter turning over to 15,000 hits?

Yeah, baby! Congrats to Shari Green who called it first! Sheri will be receiving a copy of the 2008 Golden Kite Winner HOME OF THE BRAVE, by Katherine Applegate. Lucky, lucky girl! And, we think we're even going to be able to hook her up with a signed bookplate from the author.

I'm experiencing some serious MFS (Marketing Fatigue Syndrome), so I taking a brief mental holiday from it all to share some interesting research about introverts and extraverts from Dr. Marti Olsen Laney's great book entitled THE INTROVERT ADVANTAGE.

1. Extraverts do better in grade school and on exams, but introverts do better in college and in graduate school.

2. Extraverts adapt more quickly to time-zone changes than introverts.

3. Extraverts prefer nonsense humor and introverts prefer humor that resolves something or is incongruent.

4. In a test of memory tasks, the introverts performed better than the extraverts, regardless of whether they received positive, negative or no feedback. The extravert's performance was improved by receiving positive feedback.

5. In a study on pain, extraverts complained more about pain but seemed to have a higher tolerence than introverts.

In one of my favorite lines from her book, Dr. Laney describes her thought process as an introvert-- "I found my thoughts were like lost airline baggage; they arrived some time later."

I so get that! I always feel like such a lughead in my writer's group because it takes me about three and half hours to come up with any helpful critical analysis when people share their manuscripts.

Hope you all are enjoying the first days of Spring-- growth, promise, all things new! Thanks for being part of our community. We love having you with us!

Mary Hershey

The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do men and women really speak different languages? by Deborah Cameron, Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at Oxford University, argues that gender needs to be viewed in more complex ways than the prevailing myths and stereotypes allow. In the article below Cameron looks at historical stereotypes of female orators and reflects on Hillary Clinton’s primary run.

After Hillary Clinton lost to Barack Obama in Iowa, the London Times columnist David Aaronovitch suggested that part of Mrs. Clinton’s problem might lie in our contradictory attitudes to women’s public speech. If their style is assertive they are labeled “shrill” and “strident”; if it is softer and more conciliatory, that casts doubt on their ability to lead. However she speaks, it seems a woman cannot win. (more…)

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In his book When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge K. David Harrison illustrates the individual face of language loss, as well as its global scale. He shows that the disappearance of a language is a loss not only for the community of speakers itself but also for our common human knowledge of mathematics, biology, philosophy etc… In the excerpt below Harrison introduces us to language erosion.

Scientists try to avoid being sentimental about what they study. But in working with speakers of disappearing languages, it is hard not to take seriously their own feelings of sadness, regret, even anger at the fate of their language. Svetlana D., one of the last speakers of Tofa, told me in 2001: “The other day my daughter asked me, ‘Mom, why didn’t you teach us Tofa?’…I don’t know why. Such a beautiful, difficult language! Now it is all forgotten.” (more…)

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