Posted on 10/11/2022 9:21:20 PM PDT by DoodleBob
After living in southern California for four years, upspeak, or the upward intonation at the end of a declarative statement commonly associated with “Valley girls,” rubbed off on me. At first I tried to get rid of it, worried about sounding like “one of those girls,” one like Clueless’s Cher Horowitz, someone that no one took seriously. Never mind that my upspeaking friends were pursuing graduate degrees at prestigious universities around the world, getting perfect LSAT scores, and finishing master’s programs before turning 22. But linguists Robin T. Lakoff and Mary Bucholtz included upspeak as a linguistic practice that “systemically [denies women] access to power” in their seminal work, Language and Woman’s Place. To them, the question-like sound of upspeak places the speaker in a dependent position, as if requesting information. So regardless of how smart or accomplished my friends were, the research told me their speech patterns indicated otherwise.
Lakoff and Bucholtz suspected that upspeak served as self-protection for female identified populations to avoid being perceived as bossy, bitchy, or pushy. However, the social result of upspeak can often do more harm than good. For example, Professor of psychology Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigan wrote in Psychology Today that he finds upspeak not only annoying, but so “distracting” that he is unable to hear beyond it, and situates the phenomenon mostly within his female students. This article in Forbes mentions how a woman was denied a job after her interviewer, BusinessWeek CEO and former mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg, told her she sounded like his granddaughter. Rather than questioning the blatant sexism here, the author of this article, John Baldoni instead recommends that ambitious women seek speech coaching to not only “neutralize distractions” in their voice, but actually imitate a male intonation, which is... “standard.”[i]
(Excerpt) Read more at brown.edu ...
I used to live and work in Canada.
It has been a very Canadian female thing there for ever
And it drove me nuts!
However, the instant I hear it, I consider the speaker to be an idiot and turn them off.
when confronted wi this babytalk i answer as if they actually ask a question...
i don’t know is it?
really?
etc
sometimes they catch on, sometimes not
There are more pressing issues that need attention - such as beginning every response with “so”.
There’s a second Lakoff that’s a linguist.
Rhymes With.
ya know I agree
I hate that.. That is what those women talk like at call centers!!!
“ There are more pressing issues that need attention - such as beginning every response with “so”.”
****************************************************************
Yeah, I noticed the birth of that particular linguistic abomination about 12 or 13 years ago. It’s pretty widespread now. Yuk, so annoying.
It’s annoying.
I Think technically it’s known as high rising terminal. It’s used by estupido’s mostly.
>It’s annoying
Only thing worse to listen to is voice burn
Vocal frrrrrrry.
I heard it a lot when I was working in Ireland, and a bit in England. Funny thing is I heard it more from men in Ireland and women in England. No matter; it always threw me, not because of the “valley girl” stuff, but my natural tendency was to ask “Sorry, is that a question?” Lots of convos died in the process. lol
[[There are more pressing issues that need attention - such as beginning every response with “so”.]]
Sooooo... what you’re saying is...
I was blessed with parents that did not engage in this speech pattern. My mother was forthright in her communication and did not engage in flowery rhetoric.
My father had an authoritarian cadence to his voice. He spoke infrequently, but when he did it was in succinct, complete, and measured sentences. He never needed to raise his voice to quiet the room or draw attention.
Although I am a woman, I have adopted his speech pattern. It has served me well in business.
I have also trained my children from an early age to avoid verbal ticks and filler words. They are articulate and well-spoken, thereby enhancing their chances for future success.
My heart breaks for the young people who sound like they were raised in the gutter or have air between their ears.
Both the men and the women talked in upspeak in the SF Bay Area where I worked for about a year in 2016. I hated it.
Vocal fry was common there as well. So was that annoying way of saying “eeyyaaund” for “and.”
That’s the best way to handle that.
Upspeak and vocal fry are THE MOST ANNOYING sounds ever. Very unprofessional and distracting. Especially vocal fry.
Ugghhh…the “so” people.
And when people follow “so” with some b.s. of their own because they’re trying to start an argument, it’s disingenuous.
There are some FReepers who do it as well.
”I don’t want to get a Covid vaccine.”
”So you want to infect and kill everyone you come in contact with?”
(That’s really how ridiculous they are.)
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