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This study, using conversation analysis as the research methodology, probes into the use of nage (literally "that") as a practice of managing awkward, sensitive, or delicate issues in radio phone-in medical consultations about sex-related problems. Through sequential manipulation and turn manipulation, the caller uses stand-alone nage, either as a pronoun referring to a sex organ or sex-related problem or as a filler, to delay or to build up to the explicit mentioning of the names of sex organs or sex-related problems. In addition, nage also makes a compounded occurrence as "nage þ noun." Both in the stand-alone form and the compounded form, nage as a delicate issue managing practice in some sense helps the caller to distance him-or herself from sex-related topics, which are normatively avoided in conversations, and simultaneously helps the caller to portray him-or herself as a victim rather than an agent of the sex-related problems.

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The focus of this article is to compare and contrast how teachers interact with parents about their children’s involvement in school conflicts. To showcase tricky social interactions of this kind, we choose conversation analysis as a contrastive analysis method and take a pair of telephone calls in which a teacher calls the respective parents of the agent and victim involved in a school fight. Data analyses show that the teacher minimizes incident severity and reasonably attributes responsibility in her call to the victim’s parent to prompt forgiveness, whereas attributes full responsibility and maximizes incident severity in her talk with the agent’s parent to press for apology. In their responses, both parents build up “good child” and “good parent” identities and seek for the teacher’s affiliation with their parenting. The mediation calls end when mutual alignment and affiliation are achieved.