Did you ever listen to a young woman talk when you swear she’s about to morph into a croaking frog right before your eyes?
Well, don’t feel so alone. There’s a technical name for it. It’s called “vocal fry,” one of the most annoying verbal-pattern trends in a long time. Some blame the trashy, air-headed Kardashian sisters for this froggy fad because they are known for talking that way – speaking a word or two, especially at the end of a sentence, by lowering the voice and evoking a kind of guttural-croaky flutter. It’s often used to express disdain or sarcasm. Men do that, too, but it’s not noticed as much since most men have deep voices to begin with. You will often hear vocal fry in country-western singing, male and female, and it’s often so overdone with fake sappy sentiment it ruins many an otherwise decent song.
Awhile back, I wrote a column about people who are degrading the English language through sloppiness in writing. Some gentleman emailed me to thank me, and then he suggested I write a column about two of his pet peeves – vocal fry and uptalk.
I knew what uptalk is; it’s long been one of my peeves, too. But I had no idea what he meant by vocal fry – until, that is, I googled it and saw and heard a video of Zooey Deschanel doing “vocal fry” on a talk show. She was talking about her dogs.
“They’re so cute, yeahhhhh. They reallllly like me,” she said, turning the words “yeah” and “really” into low-down guttural swamp croaks.
Just then, the meaning of vocal fry dawned on me. “Oh, that!” I said. “I didn’t know that irritating habit had a name.”
Why vocal fry? Nobody seems to know. Some who research the human voice think it might be that women are trying to attain a gravitas by mimicking men’s low voices. Studies show men with low voices tend to make more money and are taken a tad more seriously than men with higher, wimpier voices. Other researchers think some women use the vocal fry because they think it’s sexy, like a cat-purring come-on. According to the Journal of Voice, three of four women are using vocal fry these days. The question is: When, oh when, will they stop it?
Now, let’s move on to uptalk. Uptalk, also known as a high-rising terminal, is when people go around asking questions all day, even when they don’t need answers. What they do is make their statements sound like questions because they raise their voice on the last word. Again, usually it’s women who do this. Here are some examples:
“I’m going to go to the café now and have some coffee?”
“I love when summer comes around?”
“Like, hey, I went to the supermarket yesterday? I, like, bought some yogurt? And I really liked it?”
Again, nobody knows how uptalk originated, although teen-aged “Valley Girls” in California used uptalk to the point of nausea in the 1980s. Enough to “gag you with a spoon,” as they used to put it.
Diane DiResta, a professional speaking coach, calls uptalk a rampant “verbal virus” that can make girls and women sound tentative, insecure, unconfident and weak. It is, she said, deadly in job interviews, and she recommends all girls and women, with one another’s help, practice stopping it.
Another verbal tic is one I call the snide glide because I don’t know if it has even been named yet. As far as I can tell, it originated among yuppie sorts in the 1980s, probably on college campuses, because I’ve heard it most often from people who came of age as College Joes at about that time. Joe Scarborough, co-host of the Morning Joe show on TV, uses the snide glide quite often. It’s a way of pronouncing a word in a kind of snide way and drawing the word out in a slightly nasal drawl.
Example: “Well, Mika is in southern Frannnce again, soaking up the sun, probably.”
The snide glide is not excessively annoying, but it does give an almost cocky, condescending impression of the speaker.
And speaking of the Morning Joe show, co-host Mika Brezinski should quit using the word “sorry.” She too often precedes her statements with that word, spoken in a kind of whining voice. “Well, I’m sorrrry, but I think that candidate went too far with his vulgarity.” And she often adds, “You may think I’m crazy, but that’s how I feel.”
It’s easy to understand why she uses those words, betraying her defensiveness. It’s because co-host Joe often teases, browbeats and talks over her. But what’s ironic is Brezinski started the “Know Your Value” movement, an excellent empowering effort for women in the workplace, and so she, of all people, should quit using such defensive, whimpering, apologetic words when she states her good opinions.
