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...