In prudent society, women are no longer deemed to be the weaker sex, but they are universally acknowledged to be the more garrulous. Since the first woman dropped mankind into Free Fall by chatting to the serpent in the Garden of Eden, runaway tongue has been considered the feminine vice – at least by misogynistic males. Gabby women are as much of a stock theme as mothers-in-law for unreconstructed comedians. Philosophers considered silence the virtue of a woman. They would, wouldn’t they? Socrates, notoriously, had a windbag wife. From the Old Testament to St Paul, the Bible deplores female loquacity: “Let women learn in silence, with all subjection.” In popular fiction, strong, silent men do things. Women just talk about them.

But this now turns out to be another male misconception. Psychologists at the University of Texas studied the speech patterns of hundreds of university students for eight years. They used an electronically activated recorder (EAR) to log the natural language of their subjects. And they publish their results today. The average woman spoke 16,215 words during her waking hours, the average man 15,669. This difference is nugatory, compared with the difference between the most talkative person (male), 47,000 words a day, and the least, a laconic 500.

Give a shrink a gadget called EAR and she/he hears strange voices. This research takes no account of the supposedly slow rate of words spoken in Texas. And it misses the point of the folk legend. Quality of words matters more than quantity, irrespective of the sex of the speaker. To explain the difference in quality, we would need far more words than are on offer here.