Diana Boxer

Diana Boxer is professor of linguistics at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Born in a dispaced person's camp in post WWII Germany, she immigrated to the US with her parents and brother before her first birthday and became a naturalized citizen five years later. Her writing centers on talk--with family, friends, colleagues, and in public life. She also teaches and writes about gender differences in conversational interaction, cross-cultural interactions, and second language learners' spoken discourse.

Diana Boxer is the author or editor of four books, the most recent of which is The Lost Art of the Good Schmooze: Building Rapport and Defusing Conflict in Everyday and Public Talk. This is written for the educated general audience of non-linguists. The book shows how the original meaning of Schmooze, from Yiddish, meant simply chatting for chatting's sake--for the goal of establishing warm feelings of pure interaction. It was not for getting ahead, networking, or any direct benefit. The book uses excerpts from real conversational exchanges in private and public settings, political and media interactions, to illustrate how a good schmooze can be turned into indirect social benefit without the humiliation of "sucking up" or the hypocrisy of "the hard sell.