The office looks strikingly similar to the many other academic offices in this building; it is perhaps even a bit smaller than most. The desk is cluttered, full bookshelves stand against the wall, and the view from the fourth floor of Georgetown University’s vast Intercultural Center, while pleasant, is unspectacular.
But a closer look at the books lined on these plain metal shelves belies the extraordinary tenant of the room where they sit.
There are books with the plain, solid-toned covers. Those are not unusual in offices like these?the author meant them for colleagues, the select few sufficiently versed in the jargon of the field to decipher them. There are other books, though?rows of identical, busily designed, brightly colored titles. It’s these books, meant not for the specialist but for the casually interested, that makes this office any different. Rows of identical, brand-new copies of these books wait to be distributed to friends, family and maybe even those jargon-loving colleagues. Millions of copies of these books have been printed, and chances are very good that if you haven’t read one of these books yourself, someone you know has.
This is the office of Professor Deborah Tannen, who has sold more books than any linguist in history. Just over a decade ago, her book You Just Don’t Understand, which explained the different natures of male and female conversational style, spent four years on the New York Times bestseller list, including eight months at the top. She has appeared dozens of times on programs such as Oprah and Larry King Live. According to a 1999 study, her essays are read by college first-years more often than works by Jean-Paul Sartre and Frederick Douglass. She is, as a blurb on the back cover one of her later books testifies, “the world’s most famous linguist.”
So what is the world’s most famous linguist doing this dour March afternoon? She’s holding office hours, like so many other professors, in that very office that looks like so many others. It’s a measure of what is extraordinary about Tannen. Despite her notoriety, the mundane details of academic life still remain mundane for her. But little is mundane about Tannen herself. Though she finds herself in an otherwise ordinary place, she continues to do extraordinary things as a scholar and a teacher.
It’s got to be fate,” says the middle-aged Tannen, a tall, energetic woman with a faint trace of a Brooklyn accent, of her career at Georgetown. “Karma.”
If fate is responsible for Tannen’s tenure at Georgetown, it is likely responsible for her interest in linguistics at all too. After receiving her master’s degree in English in 1970, Tannen went to Greece to teach English. It was there that she became interested in communications across cultural barriers. When she returned, she decided it was a subject worth exploring.
“I was getting bored and I wanted to do something different,” Tannen recalled. “I could go to law school, I could get a Ph.D. in English.” However, she decided to pursue another option. On little more than a whim, she decided to enroll in the Linguistic Society of America’s summer institute at the University of Michigan. “What’s this linguistics thing?” she recalled thinking. “I’d heard about it, it kind of fascinated me.”
Even more fortuitously, the theme of that summer’s institute was “Language in Context,” which focused not on the traditional “hard” disciplines, but on the nascent field of sociolinguistics. Over that summer, Tannen’s infatuation with the study of language only grew.
“I just got totally hooked; I just loved it,” she recalled excitedly, struck again now as she was then with the awesome ability “to use this technical discipline to figure out what was going on in relationships and in everyday conversation.”
She decided to pursue a doctorate in linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. While still a graduate student, Tannen published several pieces in academic journals with titles ranging from the delightfully arcane “A Cross-Cultural Study of Oral Narrative Style” to the downright enigmatic “Well, What Did You Expect?” By the time she secured her Ph.D. in 1979, she was an extremely attractive candidate for a number of jobs in the “publish or perish” academic realm, including tenure-track positions in English and communications. Tannen, however, wanted to stay in her graduate discipline?linguistics?and more particularly, in her specialty?sociolinguistics, the study of language’s role in society.
Luckily, that year, Georgetown University was hiring.
Tannen’s friend and colleague, Ralph Fasold, who has taught sociolinguistics at Georgetown since 1968, sees how fate might have had something to do with it. “Why we chose her was obvious, she was by several orders of magnitude the best candidate,” said Fasold. “Why she came here … was a little bit surprising, since the department as it was then did not necessarily look like a hospitable place for her kind of work.”
For Tannen, the attraction was having other sociolinguists like Fasold in the same department. While such focused programs are certainly unique today, 20 years ago, they were rare. It also didn’t hurt that Tannen, a native New Yorker, preferred the East Coast.
And for a decade, Tannen was an academic. She was an outstanding academic, to be sure, but professionally little more than that. After writing numerous academic publications, she published her first general-audience book, That’s Not What I Meant! to a modest reception in 1986.
That modest reception could not anticipate the enormous success of its follow-up, You Just Don’t Understand. After its 1990 publication, the quiet life of Deborah Tannen, sociolinguist, would become the somewhat more intense lifestyle of Deborah Tannen, public intellectual. Said Tannen, “I had my life before You Just Don’t Understand and my life after You Just Don’t Understand, and it’s totally different.”
Among the clutter on her desks is a small stack of books. These books have yet to be published?Tannen has been asked to “blurb” them before publication, that is, write clipped superlatives on the back covers of new books. Few, however, do as many as Tannen: She’s asked to do two or three a week.
It’s one tedious cost of success. Today, Tannen has millions of books in print. She has appeared innumerable times on television and radio. She has written numerous op-ed and feature pieces for major American newspapers. As a speaker, she is represented by the same agency that represents Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger.
“I spend much more of my life making decisions about what should I do and what should I not do … I can’t do everything,” said Tannen, whose gracious demeanor demonstrates clearly that she wishes she could.
“My husband says ‘You know, don’t get aggravated, if you want to do it, do it; if you don’t want to do it, don’t,’ but I get aggravated,” she said. “If I have the power to help somebody, how can I not do it?”
Despite her success, there is no “Deborah Tannen Inc.” to handle and market her affairs. There is, however, one David Robinson, “the buffer between me and the world,” as Tannen likes to put it. When Tannen returned to Georgetown from sabbatical at Stanford and Princeton after the release of You Just Don’t Understand, she was provided an assistant from a university grateful for its professor’s newfound notoriety.
“If I didn’t have David, I’d have to ignore most of what comes in and then everybody gets offended,” said Tannen. “When people want to contact me, they get a response, and that’s really important because I represent something to people and I represent Georgetown.”
But what do people want from the professor? Well, says Tannen, there are students writing about her work, nosy journalists and, most of all, people requesting therapy.
Yes, therapy. This comes as little surprise to the distinguished professor. Today, if you wish to buy You Just Don’t Understand from your local Borders or Barnes and Noble, don’t try looking for the linguistics section, because there isn’t one. Instead, head straight to self-help.
“When I first realized it, I was horrified. ‘You can’t do this to me, I’m not a self-help writer!’” said Tannen. “But the publisher would say to me, ‘Where are we going to put you?’ There is no linguistics section, and if there were one, and they put the book there, nobody would find it.”
Such are the perils of being a mere popularizer,” as those who would malign Tannen might call her. The true irony is that she is nothing of the sort: Her popular work is based on her academic work, which is based on her original research. “Popularizer,” then, is not only a stretch, but also a downright insult. In fact, Tannen’s books since You Just Don’t Understand, particularly Talking from 9 to 5 and The Argument Culture, tend to integrate the scholarly and popular aspects of her work, making for a denser read and aimed at more selective audiences.
“I probably still produce more than your average academic in the academic realm, and all this other stuff is just added on,” claimed Tannen, whose frighteningly long curriculum vitae only confirms such claims. Tannen claims writing comes naturally, and her prolificity is downright legendary, says Fasold, who remains amazed she finished the manuscript of Talking from 9 to 5 in the span between one Christmas and Easter.
Tannen is by any measure an accomplished writer. “I always felt that underneath I was really a writer, and that my academic writing is just a facet of writing,” she said. Besides her bestsellers, she has published a number of short stories, essays and poems. In 1994, a pair of plays she wrote were staged and later published in a collection of best American plays.
Of course, there has been criticism. It’s part of the territory for any sociolinguist, testified Fasold, who said those engaged in the traditional “hard” disciplines, such as syntax, phonetics, morphology and semantics, tend to look down upon sociolinguists, regardless of success. However, for Tannen, success undoubtedly amplified that criticism within academia, and opened a whole new salvo from outside. The high tide was certainly a New Republic cover story from 1993 excoriating her work. “It was flattering,” she said with a somewhat humored note. “It hurt my feelings, but it was pretty flattering.”
There are no critics to be found on the fourth floor of the ICC, however. Fasold remembered when a Washington Post reporter profiled the sociolinguistics faculty in 1996. As hard as she tried to extract a sour word from Tannen’s colleagues, she was uniformly unsuccessful. “I think she found someone at [the University of] Chicago to say something mixed,” joked Tannen.
Those heady days, however, are largely over as the “agonistic culture” of academia has moved on to riper targets. “My star was up when the book had been on the bestseller list for four years. Now, it’s definitely back down to earth,” she claimed, and that seems not to bother her one bit.
Fingering a single identity for Tannen, like for most people, is hopeless. To many, she might seem a self-help guru, to others a talking head on Larry King. “You don’t always get to define yourself,” said Tannen, to whom this is troubling, considering the connotations of those particular identities. Certainly mere “sociolinguist” fails to encompass all she’s accomplished, while more general labels, like “public intellectual” fail to capture the nature of her work.
But, says Tannen, her identity as an academic comes first. It’s teaching?an often overlooked part of the academic life?that’s central to that identity. Without the teaching process, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for her to replicate her work and her success. Said Tannen, teaching itself is part of the process.
It is in front of those classes?graduate seminars and undergraduate surveys alike?where Tannen exposes her ideas first. In all of her classes, her students keep journals of conversation they encounter. She reads every journal entry, from the smallest seminar to the largest lecture hall course, and she uses some of that data in her work. More generally, in her classes, her work is discussed and dissected. Her students read a fair amount of Tannen’s own work.
“I think about it as ‘How am I going to present this to the class?’ The ideas don’t form in my head until I’m thinking about how I’m going to present this to the class, and while I’m up in front of the class talking about it, ideas come, and the students pump things out; there’s real insight. You can’t think in a vacuum.”
Certainly many other scholars have gleaned research ideas from classes?but not every academic has penned five best-selling books. Rather, Tannen is, quite simply, a academic superstar. This label, however, is ripe with connotation?the past decade saw a number of such “superstars” jump from university to university, lured by tremendous salaries and great prestige. This superstar, however, has been at one university for more than 20 years and has no plans to leave any time soon.
That’s not to say Tannen hasn’t received offers. But it’s not money that keeps her at Georgetown. “I’m not interested in huge amounts of money,” she said. “I like it here because this is the right place.”
In the years after You Just Don’t Understand, Tannen chose to restrict her teaching to graduate classes, where many of those students came to Georgetown precisely to study with her. However, this past fall, she taught “Cross-Cultural Communication,” a class she believes every Georgetown student should take, to a class of 40 undergraduates, and she will be offering the same class again next semester.
“I feel very lucky that now I get to talk about this stuff and have millions of people listen, but it was equally inspiring when I just was talking to one class,” Tannen remarked.
One of Tannen’s former students, an undergraduate, walks into the office. She carries Tannen’s latest book in her hand, and hands it to her with a smile.
“Who do you want me to sign it to?” Tannen asks cheerfully.
“Um, Sarah.”
“S-A-R-A-H?”
“Yes. Or put ‘kasha,’” she giggles.
“Was she in the ‘kasha’ conversation?” asks Tannen with a broad smile, referring to a conversation the student had recorded for class.
“Yes, she was.”
Such intimacy and familiarity with former students, especially undergraduates, is rare among college professors, but for Tannen, it’s simply nature.
Tannen recalled an instance when another famous author visited Georgetown to speak to students. On the way to dinner together after the author’s speech, a student approached the person, asking her to sign a book. She refused, and Tannen was horrified. “You have a responsibility not to hurt people’s feelings, if you can help it,” she said.
However intimate relationships with her fans might be, Tannen gives an extraordinary level of attention to her students. Tannen tries to keep her relationship with her students as “normal” as possible, something she attributes to having an assistant. “It’s a filter that keeps the world out, but lets the students through,” said Tannen. “I don’t ever want students to feel there’s a wall around me.” But, strangely enough, in this quest to be normal, she’s become extraordinary. There are the names, for example?40 of them, to be exact.
Adeline Wong (SFS ‘04) took Tannen’s Cross-Cultural Communication course last fall. Was the class starstruck? Not according to Wong?only about half the class had any idea that Tannen was a best-selling author until they had to read one of her books for class.
Perhaps that made their surprise at Tannen’s dedication all the more telling. Not only did she keep regular office hours, but she also knew every student’s name. And, of course, she read those journal entries aloud, which made a particular impression on Wong.
“She made the students feel really special,” she said.
This was particularly remarkable to Wong, who is a student in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, which known for the notoriety of some faculty members. Wong, who recalled a professor announcing to the class he would be absent next time because he was meeting with the Secretary of Defense, said these professors “make sure you know they are famous.”
But not Deborah Tannen. You never would have guessed.
“We don’t treat her like a celebrity; she doesn’t act like a celebrity,” said Fasold. “She’s one of the bunch.”
But right now, whether the “world’s most famous linguist” or “one of the bunch,” she is back at work. Two years ago, the University received a grant from the Sloan Foundation in order to conduct research on the discourse of working-class families. Four families taped everything they said for a week, and now Tannen is wading through that mountain of data. A book will follow, says Tannen, though it will likely be academic.
Of course, this is in addition to such ambitious efforts as continuing to publish scholarly articles, updating her older books and writing a novel about her father. Next month, however, Tannen will begin touring the country to promote the paperback release of her most recent book, I Only Say This Because I Love You. Hectic, indeed, but such is the life of the world’s most famous linguist.
The title does not roll easily off Tannen’s ears. Nearly 25 years since pursuing linguistics on a whim, she sits in that nondescript office with a solid claim at that title. “I don’t walk around thinking about it,” she said. “It’s pretty shocking.”
That is quite understandable. After all, up on the fourth floor, the world’s most famous linguist is just one of the bunch.
