“Riiiiiiiiight?”
C for Culture • N for News | By angela | February 28 2012, 2:30 pm
This article confirms that I AMMM a power toooooolllll at building relationships! WHAT! Like, WHAT!!
Source: The New York Times
They’re, Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA
Published: February 27, 2012
Whether it be uptalk (pronouncing statements as if they were questions? Like this?), creating slang words like “bitchin’ ” and “ridic,” or the incessant use of “like” as a conversation filler, vocal trends associated with young women are often seen as markers of immaturity or even stupidity.
Right?
But linguists — many of whom once promoted theories consistent with that attitude — now say such thinking is outmoded. Girls and women in their teens and 20s deserve credit for pioneering vocal trends and popular slang, they say, adding that young women use these embellishments in much more sophisticated ways than people tend to realize.
“A lot of these really flamboyant things you hear are cute, and girls are supposed to be cute,” said Penny Eckert, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. “But they’re not just using them because they’re girls. They’re using them to achieve some kind of interactional and stylistic end.”
The latest linguistic curiosity to emerge from the petri dish of girl culture gained a burst of public recognition in December, when researchers from Long Island University published a paper about it in The Journal of Voice. Working with what they acknowledged was a very small sample — recorded speech from 34 women ages 18 to 25 — the professors said they had found evidence of a new trend among female college students: a guttural fluttering of the vocal cords they called “vocal fry.”
A classic example of vocal fry, best described as a raspy or croaking sound injected (usually) at the end of a sentence, can be heard when Mae West says, “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me,” or, more recently on television, when Maya Rudolph mimics Maya Angelou on “Saturday Night Live.”
Not surprisingly, gadflies in cyberspace were quick to pounce on the study — or, more specifically, on the girls and women who are frying their words. “Are they trying to sound like Kesha or Britney Spears?” teased The Huffington Post, naming two pop stars who employ vocal fry while singing, although the study made no mention of them. “Very interesteeeaaaaaaaaang,” said Gawker.com, mocking the lazy, drawn-out affect.
Do not scoff, says Nassima Abdelli-Beruh, a speech scientist at Long Island University and an author of the study. “They use this as a tool to convey something,” she said. “You quickly realize that for them, it is as a cue.”
Other linguists not involved in the research also cautioned against forming negative judgments.
“If women do something like uptalk or vocal fry, it’s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional or even stupid,” said Carmen Fought, a professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. “The truth is this: Young women take linguistic features and use them as power tools for building relationships.”
The idea that young women serve as incubators of vocal trends for the culture at large has longstanding roots in linguistics. As Paris is to fashion, the thinking goes, so are young women to linguistic innovation.
“It’s generally pretty well known that if you identify a sound change in progress, then young people will be leading old people,” said Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, “and women tend to be maybe half a generation ahead of males on average.”
Less clear is why. Some linguists suggest that women are more sensitive to social interactions and hence more likely to adopt subtle vocal cues. Others say women use language to assert their power in a culture that, at least in days gone by, asked them to be sedate and decorous. Another theory is that young women are simply given more leeway by society to speak flamboyantly.
But the idea that vocal fads initiated by young women eventually make their way into the general vernacular is well established. Witness, for example, the spread of uptalk, or “high-rising terminal.”
Starting in America with the Valley Girls of the 1980s (after immigrating from Australia, evidently), uptalk became common among young women across the country by the 1990s.
In the past 20 years, uptalk has traveled “up the age range and across the gender boundary,” said David Crystal, a longtime professor of linguistics who teaches at Bangor University in Wales. “I’ve heard grandfathers and grandmothers use it,” he said. “I occasionally use it myself.”
Even an American president has been known to uptalk. “George W. Bush used to do it from time to time,” said Dr. Liberman, “and nobody ever said, ‘Oh, that G.W.B. is so insecure, just like a young girl.’ ”
The same can be said for the word “like,” when used in a grammatically superfluous way or to add cadence to a sentence. (Because, like, people tend to talk this way when impersonating, like, teenage girls?) But in 2011, Dr. Liberman conducted an analysis of nearly 12,000 phone conversations recorded in 2003, and found that while young people tended to use “like” more often than older people, men used it more frequently than women.
And, actually? The use of “like” in a sentence, “apparently without meaning or syntactic function, but possibly as emphasis,” has made its way into the Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition — this newspaper’s reference Bible — where the example given is: “It’s, like, hot.” Anyone who has seen a television show featuring the Kardashian sisters will be more than familiar with this usage.
“Like” and uptalk often go hand in hand. Several studies have shown that uptalk can be used for any number of purposes, even to dominate a listener. In 1991, Cynthia McLemore, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, found that senior members of a Texas sorority used uptalk to make junior members feel obligated to carry out new tasks. (“We have a rush event this Thursday? And everyone needs to be there?”)
Dr. Eckert of Stanford recalled a study by one of her students, a woman who worked at a Jamba Juice and tracked instances of uptalking customers. She found that by far the most common uptalkers were fathers of young women. For them, it was “a way of showing themselves to be friendly and not asserting power in the situation,” she said.
Vocal fry, also known as creaky voice, has a long history with English speakers. Dr. Crystal, the British linguist, cited it as far back as 1964 as a way for British men to denote their superior social standing. In the United States, it has seemingly been gaining popularity among women since at least 2003, when Dr. Fought, the Pitzer College linguist, detected it among the female speakers of a Chicano dialect in California.
A 2005 study by Barry Pennock-Speck, a linguist at the University of Valencia in Spain, noted that actresses like Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon used creaky voice when portraying contemporary American characters (Ms. Paltrow used it in the movie “Shallow Hal,” Ms. Witherspoon in “Legally Blonde”), but not British ones in period films (Ms. Paltrow in “Shakespeare in Love,” Ms. Witherspoon in “The Importance of Being Earnest”).
So what does the use of vocal fry denote? Like uptalk, women use it for a variety of purposes. Ikuko Patricia Yuasa, a lecturer in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, called it a natural result of women’s lowering their voices to sound more authoritative.
It can also be used to communicate disinterest, something teenage girls are notoriously fond of doing.
“It’s a mode of vibration that happens when the vocal cords are relatively lax, when sublevel pressure is low,” said Dr. Liberman. “So maybe some people use it when they’re relaxed and even bored, not especially aroused or invested in what they’re saying.”
But “language changes very fast,” said Dr. Eckert of Stanford, and most people — particularly adults — who try to divine the meaning of new forms used by young women are “almost sure to get it wrong.”
“What may sound excessively ‘girly’ to me may sound smart, authoritative and strong to my students,” she said.
Sun Leen Fai Lok!
C for Culture | By angela | January 23 2012, 4:03 pm
Happy Chinese New Year from A for Angela!
C for Cassie tells A for Angela what she LOVES about St. Cuthbert’s Mission
C for Culture | By angela | December 2 2011, 7:00 am
I’m finishing up a 5-week volunteer project in St. Cuthbert’s Mission, Guyana. Among literacy and education here, I’ve also worked with the secondary students in building a village blog! In order to encourage them to write, I created a contest, the most interesting blog post would get posted on my personal site! Enjoy.
St. Cuthbert’s Mission – A Community I Love!
By: C for Cassie
The Mahica River is dotted with white sandbanks
St. Cuthbert’s Missions is an Amerindian community situated at the left bank of the Mahica river. It’s a relaxing point for one and all, especially at the point on the river banks that are dotted with white sand.
Autumn
C for Culture | By angela | October 12 2011, 7:00 am
Though we might be having an Indian Summer in Toronto, it doesn’t dispute the fact that it is gourd season. And no one tells this tale better than McSweeny.
Source: McSweeny
It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.
BY Colin Nissan
- – - -
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.
Poutine
C for Culture • Y for Yummy | By angela | June 27 2011, 7:00 am
Listen here!
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Poutine has everything to do with Canadian culture and especially the Quebecois culture and since JE T’AIME QUEBEC! I was invited to celebrate last Friday’s St Jean Baptiste day at my Besties house in true french food fashion with a poutine party!
My Bestie asked me to help prep for this gluttonous event and of course, I obliged BUT there was NO WAY I was going to spend hours peeling potatoes. That’s just not in me. I mean I once cut myself super deep with a knife just by cleaning it – I almost passed out – I saw flesh! Millions (huge overstatement) of potatoes and 1 potato peeler? That’s just asking for a lost finger. And I like all my fingers so this post is an instructional how-to throw your very own poutine party!
City Chase: Team MeOWWWW!
C for Culture | By angela | June 24 2011, 7:00 am
The Mitsubishi Motors City Chase is happening this Saturday in Toronto! City Chase is a super fun event similar to the Amazing Race but without the TV cameras and the million dollar prize – it is what they describe as a “part obstacle course, part scavenger hunt”.
If you win City Chase, you go on to compete in the National City Chase with other regional winners. There are super fabulous prizes that are not at all worth a million dollars but you could win a brand new Mitsubishi (and I am feeling some intense product placement here however I am receiving nothing for this post *ahem Mitsubishi I too might want a brand new car). Events are scheduled across the country (Canada), click here, there’s still time to register! And if you’re from Toronto and think you won’t make it for Saturday – totally fine! There’s an another Toronto City Chase scheduled for August – what WHAT!
Still not convinced this is totally awesome? In 2009, my brother and I City Chased it up! I’ll change your mind when you read about it here:
New Mind Space
C for Culture | By angela | June 20 2011, 7:00 am
Check out these bubbles!
I loooove bubbles! Bubbles should be the epi-centre of summer (that and watermelon) and though summer hasn’t officially started the weather would probably beg to differ. As such, 2 weekends ago me and my bestie spent the afternoon blowing bubbles by the water .
Naturally my roommate found out about my not so secret love affair with bubbles by my giant bubble wand and enlightened me to one Bubble Battle in Toronto! This is something I HAD to attend! Bubble battle!! What WHAT! One small glitch – I was planning something equally cool to do that night – a 1920′s Murder Mystery with friends…dilemma! Except no dilemma, because Murder Mystery had to happen- I had full flapper costume a ready!