You can’t make this stuff up. From a reader in response to today’s column:

As always your column is exceedingly transparent, and unbearably childish. Perhaps it would be more cogent and thought provoking if you and the members of of your gender had “word game” mastery and “matching” skill. As a paid linguist, (unbelivably you get paid), you carefully dance around the meat of the study, women peform better at tasks requiring perception and verbal fluency, and you conveniently omit the studies finding that women excel at tasks requiring memory and arithmetic. Instead you predictably reduce the female grasp of language to a Chute and Ladders dexterity, while elevating the male ability of spatial and navigational reasoning to a Crimson Tide-commandeer a submarine- bravado.
Remember Mr. Goldberg it is a hypothesis not a scientific fact. If you were to apply the same pattern of logic to your own profession, you would have navigated yourself out of a job.

Me: Since this writer puts so much weight in my crafty wordsmithery, I should at least clarify that I am not a trained linguist, nor even an untrained one. Nor am I paid to be one. The rest speaks for itself.