You talk too much !!

Centuries before Frankie Ford recorded “You Talk Too Much” in 1960, the perception has long been that women talked more than men.

A number of studies have shown that the average woman speaks about 20,000 words a day, while the average man speaks about 7000. If you believe that these numbers are accurate, that would mean that over the course of a year, an average woman would speak 4.7 million more words than the average male.

Before we delve into whether women actually ARE more verbal than men, you should be aware of the fact that a group of neuroscientists and psychologists, led be Margaret McCarthy, determined that women had 30% more of a protein called Foxp2 protein in a brain area key to language in humans, which would lead you to conclude that women are more chatty than men.

We all know women who can’t seem to shut up, and the lady below is just one example:



However, there are also men who just can’t seem to stop talking, and the man below is an example of THAT phenomenon:



Politicians, of course, are wordier than most people, so it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that the longest filibuster on record is held by Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who talked for 24 hours and 18 minutes in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Although he wasn’t in favor of the Civil Rights Act (which actually got passed) he liked black people well enough to father an illegitimate black child (named Essie Mae Washington-Williams) in 1925.

The average person speaks 120 words per minute. If you assume that most people are awake for 16 hours a day, a pace of 20,000 words per day (7200 words per hour) would mean a stream of continuous conversation for slightly more than 3 hours per day. In case you’re wondering, the fastest speaker in the world is a British man named Steve Woodmore, who can speak as fast as 637 words per minute.

In 2007, researchers for Science magazine outfitted 396 college students with recording devices to determine how many words per day they spoke. Statistically, there wasn’t much different. On average, women spoke slightly more than 16,000 words per day, and men spoke slightly less than 16,000 words per day. Oddly enough, the most talkative members of the study (speaking up to a staggering 47,000 words per day) were all men. The LEAST talkative (averaging 700 words per day) were also men.

There IS a difference about what the genders talk about, since women focus more on relationships, and men concentrate on “stuff”, but it simply isn’t true that women talk a lot more than men.

And ..

That’s all that I have to say.

If you’d like to hear Frankie Ford’s original tune one more time, just click on the link below:

You Talk Too Much !!