I find excessive vocal fry or upspeak distracting in men OR women.
A little bit seems normal.
Fry is not the same thing as deep.
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Vocal Fry is totally Metal.
Also, Jazz.
Edit: Fine, fine, the Flecktones song doesnât contain Kargyraa style. Hereâs some blues with it for good measure:
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The Male Gaze, meet the The Male Ear.
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The issue (or âissueâ, if you will) is that women, especially young women, tend to lead trends in linguistics (The wikipedia article on the Gender Paradox has a lot of great links at the bottom). So, vocal fry is probably going to be sticking around. In other words, give it 40 years, and uptalk and vocal fry wonât sound strange at all. Have you noticed that in article, the people cited as having problems with it are older? In 40 years, those people are gonna be dead, and the people who have vocal fry will be in charge. And then the people with vocal fry will find something new to complain that youngsters are doing all wrong.
In other words, XKCD has got this covered⌠as usual.
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In extreme cases, it sounds to me like how strep throat feels. Iâm not particularly bothered by the sound of fingernails on a blackboard, but other people are, since the sound can be so evocative of the unpleasant way it feels to scratch your nails on a blackboard. And for some people, the sound of vocal fry sets their teeth on edge. For others, it just sounds to them like theyâre listening to an unsophisticated teenager, which can undermine the perceived authority of the speaker.
But itâs totally subjective, and apparently can be somewhat dependent on the age of the listener.
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I donât know about you, but I find Fryâs vocals absolutely delightful.
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The vocal fry is annoying as hell. Itâs obviously intentional, trendy and dumb. I donât care whether itâs women or men. Maybe itâs more noticeable in women because their voices arenât normally grating like those of long-term smokers.
Ira Glass discussed it a while back on This American Life because of complaints from listeners about their women reporters. His answer? âGet over it.â One of the women in question plainly admitted that it was intentional on her part, and annoying when she heard it in other women. There are stories now on TAL that make me switch off immediately because of the vocal fry, and that usually means I miss most of the shows because I donât go back.
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Heh, thereâs a Subreddit devoted to that: /r/AsABlackMan. The idea being, âHey, Iâm X, and I hold Y belief that is unpopular in X culture!â Itâs not just black men.
The debate makes me think of being told, when I was young, that I had to lose the drawl if I wanted to be taken seriously. Or more seriously, people telling young black people, hey, youâre going to have to lose the AAVE if you want the world thatâs dominated by white dudes to take you seriously.
Anyway, did anyone else think of this when Faith Salie said âKardashianâ?
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And another from years ago.
This kind of bizarre obsession with the way young women speak is like the bastard child of grammar pedantry and âkids these daysâ old man griping. Its not interesting, its not important, and if any other group were doing it it noone would notice.
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Oh ffs. Give me a moment and Iâll explain this shit.
Well we do tend to judge people by class and their speech. I know itâs bad in Britain where some accents are more low brow. We have the same thing here too with various accents being considered more high class and educated than others. Certain foreign accents too. Ironically, I will some times talk with a drawl if I want to be more relatable to some people.
Personally I find it is the vocabulary and use of slang is what makes someone a good speaker or not. Though good or bad speaker doesnât mean they are more or less intelligent. There are smart people who canât form a complete sentence hardly when they talk, and people who are very articulate but still idiots - just look at Obama (zing! ;o))
Not all of us agree on everythingâŚ
I think the problem is less about caring, and more about how it impacts peopleâs professional life, in this case women because some find their voices annoying.
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Itâs likely a combination of the two, as well as peopleâs speech patterns adopted over timeâŚ
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Naomi should ask young men to stop using it too because it drives me nuts regardless of the gender of the speaker. Young women do get unfairly policed in this regard. I think it could easily be as prevalent among men. Iâve probably turned the radio off and stopped podcasts as many times being annoyed by men using it as women. It really make listening to NPR a work session for me. Boy, I sound wussy saying that. I should listen to more NPR and podcasts to desensitize myself. I know itâs not going away.
No, I said that people sharing this opinion would be a remarkable coincidence. But the onus is on those who insist upon norms to provide evidence. Better to stick to evidence and disregard norms rather than argue what they may or not be.
Thatâs what bugs me about this sort of thing. People donât even agree very much about what it means to be authoritative. The idea that people who are regarded thus do or should have a certain kind of voice is simply nonsensical, yet the article glosses over how weâd even know if it was meaningful. It sounds like a purely psychological problem with no further grounding in reality. It puts people in a foolish position to concede that a norm should be recognized as a social reality, despite the apparent lack of real-world evidence for what it is supposedly based upon!
It seems kind of recursive, as if to say that since people often do this, it makes sense to accept this itself as a norm rather than trying to optimize social reality in greater accordance with the world at large.
Although I have had some wine since then, and am merely guessing as to whether or not thatâs what my initial remark was in reference to.
Look, I guess I see what you are saying, but I think there is a bigger issue.
Go listen to president Obamaâs last statement on a shooting. He speaks in deep tones, with slowed speech and literally 100% vocal fry.
In professional life my experience has been that men lower their voices and use fry when trying to be serious and professional.
We can argue all day as to why men feel compelled to do it and why women do it, but given that folks only seem to be compelled to complain about one gender and call it annoying, I donât really care for it.
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I donât think it matters if the author is a credible feminist or not. If theyâre looking to police mannerisms particularly among young people theyâveâŚ
GET THE HELL OFF MY LAWN YOU YOUNG WHIPPERSNAPPERS IN MY DAY IâD BEAT YOU WITH THE GARDEN HOSE YOU LITTLE @##%$!!!
âŚoh sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, theyâve uhh
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Naomi Wolf needs to shut the fuck up.
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Itâs called up-speak I think?
A few years ago it got the same treatment we see here though from different quarters. It was also found to be perfectly harmless and this will probably get the same rational defence.
Also people regularly rail against such things as the ever popular speech dis-fluency âlikeâ but those complaints too were/are eventually boiled down to pissing in the wind.
I have a radio voice, some people donât like that either.
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