Why Britney loves a fry-up
QUESTION Why do many young female American voices sound so croaky?
THIS phenomenon is called vocal fry – because it sounds like frying bacon. It’s a way for Millennials, girls and boys, to signify they are part of an ‘in crowd’.
It has become an increasingly habitual manner of speaking which, like all things American, has crept into the culture of other English-speaking countries.
Vocal fry was popularised by pop stars in the Noughties such as Katy Perry, Rihanna, Britney Spears and Kesha.
The archetype is Britney’s hit Baby One More Time, where she sings ‘Oh baby, baby’ using vocal fry. Vocal fry has historically been used as a trick by male baritone singers to sing bass.
It went by various names such as ‘glottal scrape’ or ‘click’ ‘croak’ or ‘creaky’ voice.
It’s achieved by squeezing the vocal [arytenoid] cartilages together. This allows the vocal cords to be loose and floppy.
When air passes between them, they vibrate irregularly, causing the croak.
In the classical world, fry is a sign of an unskilled singer.
Vocal fry’s migration into everyday speech falls into the category of a learned behaviour; it’s cognate with the adoption of inner city-slang and the upward glide at the end of a sentence.
Valerie Timmins, Bath, Somerset.
QUESTION In Victorian times, who were the Banner Ladies?
BANNER Ladies, once jokingly described as human billboards, first became popular in 1870s America.
They were young women recruited to advertise local businesses by wearing the items that they sold.
They might be dressed in bread and pretzels to advertise a bakery, flowers to promote a florist’s or cutlery and scissors on behalf of a hardware store.
There was no limit to the advertisers’ creativity as they dressed women in chairs, carpets, lightbulbs and horseshoes.
One woman was decorated with 16 hand-painted shaving mugs by a pottery designer, one wore a collection of starched collars to advertise a laundry, and another sported a camera as a hat to endorse a photography studio.
A jewellery store asked its Banner Lady to wear a clock on her head.
The women would carry signs bearing the name and address of the shop they were working for.
The craze, which arose because it saved retailers the expense of buying more permanent advertising space, spread across the Atlantic to Europe.
The Banner Ladies would be photographed in their extravagant outfits and copies of the pictures circulated as cabinet cards, the
collection of which was a novelty in an era when many depicted famous actresses and courtesans.
The Banner Lady phenomenon lasted 20 or 30 years before being overshadowed by the growing popularity of picture postcards but, even today, the word banner is still used to describe the clickinducing advertising that is found on websites.
Ian MacDonald, Billericay, Essex.
QUESTION As young lads, when ending an argument we used to say ‘fainites’. Does anyone else remember this?
THE use of ‘fainites’ was first recorded in 1870: it was a term that demanded a truce during the progress of any game, which is then always granted by the opposing party.
The word is thought have started with the game of marbles, where a child who had ‘killed’ another at marbles — that is, hit their marble — would call out ‘fainites’ or ‘Fain it’, meaning ‘you mustn’t shoot at me in return’.
The word has been traced to the 14th-century ‘feine’ or ‘faine’, itself deriving from the Old French se feindre meaning ‘to make excuses, hang back, back out (especially of battle)’.
The ‘nites’ part may have originated in ‘faine Sir Knight’, a medieval truce in jousting.
Author J. R. R. Tolkien discovered a similar use in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, where a servant says ‘that lordes heestes mowe nat been yfeyned’, meaning that his orders could not be treated with a ‘fain I’ (I decline) but must be obeyed.
There were several similar terms once in widespread use, such as: ‘keys’, ‘barley’, ‘skinch’, ‘kings’, ‘crosses’, ‘croggies’, ‘bars’, ‘creases’ or ‘scribs’.
Davy Smith, Lincoln.
QUESTION If you sent a letter in 19th-century London, could you really expect a reply within two hours?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, this must have been the case at one time. I have postcards sent to and from my grandmother in the early 1900s before World War One.
They were written and posted in the morning to say, ‘See you for tea at 4 o’clock this afternoon’.
Mavis Watling, Sittingbourne, Kent.
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