Women Are Wordier! Sometimes!

Words! Words are life to a writer. We cannot communicate without words. Pictures and signs – as in charades – evoke words in our minds. That thought leads to this blog and the difference between how men and women communicate.

My husband teaches a small group Bible study at our church on Wednesday nights. Once a quarter we do a fun night. Usually it’s just a potluck and we sit around tables and talk. And eat. Two weeks ago my husband – who loves games – chose to play a Bible trivia game patterned after the television game show Celebrity Name Game.

He announced it for a couple of weeks. It would be men against women. Yikes. We women were biting out nails. Most of the men in our group are Bible teachers/scholars. We felt doomed to lose.

Not only did we NOT lose; we won by a healthy margin. It was because of the difference between how men and women communicate. First, let me clarify that it wasn’t all profound theological topics. It was any word found in the Bible. The game was played by a team member sitting in a chair with a screen behind him or her. A word was flashed on the screen, and a designated “caller” shouted clues (although the groups, men or women, got excited and helped call out clues. We weren’t too strict on that). The object was to get as many words as possible in 60 seconds. We rotated players continually.

The women won because we gave simplistic clues. The men….not so much. For example, the word donkey. The ladies’ clue: “Not a horse or mule, but like a mule.” The men gave a theological explanation which took longer to say: “Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Good Friday on one. Balaam had a talking one.”

Temple: The women’s clue: Points to temple on forehead, “What do we call this?”  Men: “People worship there and made sacrifices. The priests were there.”

King Jehoshaphat. Women: “We get the term Jumping blank from this king. (Jumping Jehoshaphat)”  Men: “He was a king in Judah. Had a son named Jerhoam who married Ahab’s daughter.”

Usually, by nature, women are wordier than men. We won’t tell you something using 6 words if we can use 60. But in the mentioned game, it was obvious women’s brains were quicker to grasp the clue than men. They tended to get more frustrated when the clue-receiver didn’t get the word immediately.

It was a fun game night for us, and just my observations. Maybe it’s why there are more women writers and readers.