Testosterone Grammar

Op-Ed Columnist
What Women Want
By JOHN TIERNEY

Mr. Tierney: Your report of the experiments that show women not interested in insane competition as men are represents a salute to the sanity and balance of women. I suspect a woman's replacement of George Bush would have saved us a bloody war with no basis but the acting out of neocon-testosterone-poison competition in the safety of the Oval Office. Most of these Oval Office warriors chose to skip their service obligations in their own war, so they are fans of ersatz competition that does not involve their life and limb.

Your getting this pundit job instead of a qualified woman's getting it represents some kind of distortion in the choice of a man instead of woman in the men's psyches who hired you. Maybe we could have the two women who conducted the gender-competition study take on the task of determining what kind of male nutcake factors resulted in your hiring instead of a more qualified woman.

Meanwhile, since the damage is done and you're the new columnist, try to learn grammar and punctuation. I am a shareholder and don't like to see the errors below in the paper.

lee drury de cesare

By JOHN TIERNEY

The men's eagerness partly stemmed from overconfidence, because on average men rated their ability more highly than the women rated theirs.

"Partly" is a misplaced modifier. It should go before "from." The comma cuts off a restrictive trailing adverbial clause. Any woman you flagged down in the street could tell you that men routinely overestimate their ability--especially their sexual ability, the mother of all competitive abilities in men's lexicon.