Moreover it is inconceivable for a woman to use "strong" expletives, such as damn or shit; she can only say oh dear or fudge. A syntactic feature that Robin Lakoff believes is more widely used by women is the tag question, as in You'd never do that, would you? As Fasold (1990: 104) comments, "greater use of this form by women could mean that women, more often than men, are presenting themselves as unsure of their opinions and thereby as not really having opinions that count very much."
A third explanation is that, by using standard or polite forms, a woman is trying to protect her face (a term often used in sociolinguistics to denote a person's needs and wants in relation to others - for further details, see Brown and Levinson, 1978). In other words, a woman claims more status in society. Her greater use of standard forms may also imply that she does not attend solely to her own face needs but also to those of the people she is interacting with, thus avoiding disagreement and seeking agreement and rapport.
Early in her article entitled "Language and women's place," Lakoff (1973a: 46, cited in Fasold, 1990: 107) insightfully remarks: "We will find, I think, that women experience linguistic discrimination in two ways: in the way they are taught to use language, and in the general way language use treats them" (my emphasis). Apparently, she refers to various lexical items such as generic subjects, which have the effect of excluding women. Let us have a look at some examples