Pet peeve-thy name is Vocal Fry!!!

[pony mom]

Anyone else annoyed by this? You know, when a young women starts out speaking with a full voice and ends up in a croak towards the end? Ugh. Now I notice it everywhere. Sing out Louise!!!

http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/vid...al-fry/6g24b6c

(there's a short ad at the start of the video)

[iris lily]

yep, I've heard it, just didn't realize it's a trend. I find it preferable to the affectation making a statement using intonation of a question. That's drives me batty.

But just talking plain like is the best choice.

[Mrs-M]

Life, and the many things people adopt and pick-up, never fails to surprise me. The problem nowadays, people have way too much time on their hands and the media is way too out there.

At any rate, I was listening to a great radio broadcast a few weeks back, and there was a women on the program doing the vocal-fry thing, and I had to turn the program off.

[Tradd]

Mrs-M, love your smiley!

[Mrs-M]

It is great isn't it, Tradd. It's one of my favourites.

[catherine]

What a difference from the way women spoke in the 40s--at least in the movies. I believe that speech pattern was called American Standard Theatre speech, which is the pattern they trained people on if they were going to be actors or broadcasters, etc. The tones were so round and full. Actually, I think elocution was a subject regularly taught in schools--like penmanship. Wow, two disciplines that have become completely as archaic as Greek or Latin. Now we're reduced to vocal fry.

[Mrs-M]

Originally posted by Catherine.
Now we're reduced to vocal fry.

Well said.

[AnneM]

My three twenty-something nieces do the vocal-fry thing. I didn't know there was a term for it. They pair vocal fry with ending a sentence as a question. It's funny in that I have twenty-something nephews, and now that I think about it, they don't do the vocal fry thing. Weird!

[peggy]

So it's not just the whisky and cigarettes...?

[leslieann]

My teenage DSD does it, even though I didn't know there was a name for it. She pairs that with trailing off into words that don't mean anything ("whatever, whatever, blah, blah, blah.....") and so you are left trying to decipher whether she actually MEANS anything by her communication, and, if so, WHAT she might mean. Her dad is really good at making her define her reference points so we can tell if her brain is working or not.

Hehehe.......gravelly, growly, whatever whatever.....