women almost twice (52%) as many compliments on physical appearance as women gave men (26%). This tendency to praise physical attractiveness (as opposed to "skill, possession, etc.") was attributed to several theories: Women were more wary of giving compliments, especially those regarding physical appearance, for fear of being interpreted as too forward and romantically assertive. Alternately, men readily gave more obvious compliments. Male initiation of romantic relations is more socially acceptable, so a misinterpreted compliment would not be viewed as unnatural. Men are less accustomed to respond to or expect admiration related to physical appearance that is not an expression of romantic interest. This is attributed to the relative rarity of the sincere male-male compliment in comparison to the near-ubiquitous female-female compliment. There is an expectation among both genders that women place greater significance on physical appearance than do men, and would therefore be more likely to give and receive compliments based on this quality. An additional explanation from Wolfson posits that in the "American pattern", since men rarely give/receive appearance-related compliments from other men and rarely receive appearance-related compliments from women, the topic of physical attractiveness is not an appropriate topic for compliments from either men or women. She notes that such compliments only occur when the male is much younger than the female. Robin Lakoff's famous work on "women's speech" has been evaluated by Brower, Gerritsen, and DeHaan, and they found that the inventory of words that had been labeled as characteristically "women's speech" were actually used by both genders when addressing women, especially in complimentary language. What had previously been categorized as adjectives primarily used by women ("adorable", "charming","sweet", "lovely", "divine", as opposed to the neutral words "great", "terrific","cool", "neat") were found in numerous examples of men referring to or addressing women. Though still unproven, this type of "unusual" discourse further emphasizes a distinction between complimentary and regular language. Studies that discuss opposite-sex compliments in specialized environments include Lauzen and Dozier's study on compliments on primetime sitcoms. Though by no means as natural as everyday interactions, the number and type of appearance comments between female and male characters both mirror and conflict with data from real-life studies. Most realistically accurate was the fact that female characters were twice as likely to be recipients of appearance-based comments. Conflicting facts include the balanced number of male-female and female-male compliments based on physical appearance, as opposed to others' findings that