The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch

The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch is a "comic" short story by Arthur C. Clarke, from his collection of "science fiction tall tales," "Tales from the White Hart". (The word "defenestration" means throwing someone or something out of the window; in the story, Clarke carefully avoids disclosing the definition of defenestration.)

The story is about the common household quarrel: the husband (Osbert Inch) thinks the wife (Ermintrude) speaks too much, 100 words to each one of his, while the wife disagrees. The husband, who is also a BBC sound engineer, decides to resolve the dispute by using technology. He invents a machine that will prominently display two counters in living room: the number of words spoken by the wife and by the husband by automatically listening to the conversation.

Of course, the dispute doesn't get settled amicably by such logical means as making the data speak!

Clarke's story anticipates (after a fashion) the recent work of Matthias R. Mehl et al at the University of Arizona. An oft-repeated, unsubstantiated claim states women speak 3 words for each word uttered by men. Mehl and his colleagues actually collected the same data as was to be displayed on Osbert's 'Selective Word Counter.' In the real world, hundreds of people in two countries participated and the data was of course not disclosed to the subjects, so as not to influence the outcome. The researchers found no statistically significant difference between women and men in the number of words spoken per day (about 16,000 each).Fact|date=March 2008 No instances of defenestration were recorded.