https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/the-psychology-of-the-hey-ladies-email.html
By
Ashley Fetters
(...)
Hey Ladies is an epistolary novel for the age of group chats and reply-all threads: Through emails and text messages, it chronicles a year in the life of eight best friends living in New York, starting on a bleary, hungover January 1 (with a postmortem of a night of drunken single-gal mischief) and ending on the following bleary, hungover January 1 (with a postmortem of the drunken mischief at one of the emailers’ New Year’s Eve wedding). Their emails illustrate how a surprise proposal, a spate of money troubles and work-life turbulence, and an avalanche of bridal-party drama affect a group friendship — and for many readers, it’s hitting just a little too close to home. As the founding editors of The Toast themselves proclaim in a blurb on the back of the book, “There’s a level of detail here that can only come from years of paying attention to one’s own worst impulses.”
So how does Hey Ladies manage to pull off its hilarious, sometimes mortifying verisimilitude? I spoke to Deborah Tannen, Georgetown linguistics professor and author of You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships, about how Markowitz and Moss managed to nail the tone and unspoken subtext of women’s friend-group planning emails, how the text and email mediums specifically lend themselves to deception and back-channel communication, and the subtle tyranny of “I already made the reservation.”
According to Moss, there are three basic components to a prototypical Hey Ladies email: An expressed desire to schedule an event on a date that works for everyone’s schedules, followed by immediate disregard for everyone’s schedules (“Everyone’s like, ‘Tuesday and Wednesday would be good,’ then you get the email back that’s like ‘Great, Thursday it is’”); a request that everyone please Venmo or PayPal or send a check to the emailer; and a hefty quantity of enthusiastic exclamation points.
Tannen, in particular, loved the book’s spot-on imitation of women’s digital writing patterns — it indulges in lots of repeated letters for emphasis and, of course, the aforementioned punctuation tic. “The exclamation point is kind of the standard default punctuation mark now,” she said. “The standard default punctuation in paper print was the period, but a period now on these digital platforms has a negative meaning. It means you’re angry. The default would be nothing or an exclamation point.
“I think for women in particular, if you don’t have an exclamation point, it’s like you’re under-enthusiastic,” she adds.
Tannen calls this concept “enthusiasm constraint”: “You have to show a certain level of enthusiasm or people will think you don’t mean it or you’re being sarcastic,” she said. “Then the multiple ones show actual enthusiasm.”...
