davidgagne.net

I’m much more interested in how this particular speech pattern became known as “the female register” than I am in the legal aspects of this discussion.

“Once they have been arrested, even the toughest thugs turn to jelly. More precisely, Ainsworth says suspects lapse into a deferential mode called the female register, identified in women’s speech 25 years ago. When speaking in this way, people turn statements into questions and avoid direct commands. They use the conditional form of verbs, such as “might”, “may” and “should”, to weaken the impact of what they are saying. They also hedge everything with phrases such as “kind of” and use inflections more appropriate to questions.”