Why burn women with all this ‘vocal fry’ talk?
Social critic Naomi Wolf should know that language is dynamic. So is its delivery, by either sex
Merriam-Webster added “vocal fry” to the dictionary in May.
The term, which sounds like a ghastly new frozen food from McCain, is defined as “a vocal effect produced by very slow vibration of the vocal cords and characterized by a creaking sound and low pitch.” A second definition, not in any reference book, might simply be: “The sound of young women getting judged again.”
It’s wacky. First it was snickers about Valley Girl patter. Next came sneers over “baby talk” and “whisper tones.” Then it was rebukes for “uptalk,” in which intonation rises so declarations sound like questions: “That wasp almost landed ON YOUR FACE?”
Now, the phonetic bugaboo that’s allegedly making young women seem weak, ditzy, scattered and infantile is vocal fry.
In 2011, NBC’s Today aired a segment about how this “low-pitched vibrato sound” was “creeping into young women’s speech patterns.” About a week later, CNN defined vocal fry as a “creaky, deep sound made when the human voice is at the lowest register,” usually at the end of a sentence.
The human voices used as examples were all female: Kesha, Britney Spears, Zooey Deschanel and Kim Kardashian.
Around this time, the dubious notion that vocal fry was, a) a new trend and, b) unique to women got cemented in the culture. Then, this week, social critic Naomi Wolf pitched her scold tent atop the dialectical quicksand and sank into the muck.
In a Guardian essay titled, “Young women, give up the vocal fry and reclaim your strong female voice,” Wolf wrote that 20-somethings in North American and Britain are the “most empowered generation of women ever.”
They are also, in her view, “hobbled” by “how they use their voices.”
Say what? It was a startling thesis, not least because a feminist icon wrote it. Here was the author of The Beauty Myth contributing to a linguistic myth, creating a gender divide from the flimsiest of anecdotal evidence.
As Wolf knows, language is dynamic. So is delivery. This is why dialogue in old movies sounds so unnatural today and why even fragments of crowd shrieks from Woodstock to Live Aid can ring out with different modulations.
In junior high, I recall a time when classmates seemed to end every utterance with a conjunction. As in, “We should get patties for lunch but.”
It seems bizarre now. That’s how we talked back then but.
In the ’90s, Friends influenced the cadence and inflection of many young viewers who started to put stresses on intransitive verbs: “Could this be more annoying?” More recently, you’ve probably had a friend agree with something you say by spitting out a rhetorical interjection: “Right?” This evolved from, “I know, right?” You also probably know people who overuse “you know” or drag out the first consonant at the start of a sentence: “Yyy-yeah.”
This is how we talk now. It won’t be the way we talk in the future.
What it has absolutely nothing to do with is gender. Yet with the possible exception of Gilbert Gottfried, men are never judged by “how they use their voices.” Do you know how many Fortune 500 companies are run by mumbly, close-talking male execs prone to tangents and awkward silence?
With respect to vocal fry, when a man deploys a raspy staccato, it’s rarely detected. It’s certainly never parsed for insights into his lack of intelligence or confidence.
We listen to what a guy has to say, not how he says it.
For proof, just watch any postgame scrum with a male athlete.
This American Life recently aired an episode about vocal fry, ironic given host Ira Glass fries his words so often he should change his name to Ima Bacon. One online video compilation of men with the alleged verbal tic includes Johnny Depp, Bruce Willis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Vin Diesel, Tom Hardy and Howard Stern. Slate, meanwhile, turned “vocal fry guys” into an audio mashup.
The funny thing is if you listen to Wolf, you’ll perceive certain oral quirks, including uptalk, circumlocution and the occasional run-on sentence.
No sensible observer would deem this a mental defect or an act of self-sabotage, or extrapolate generalizations about other women. To do so would require elevating style and burying substance. It would mean judging Wolf by vapid criteria never directed at her male peers.
That’s just the way she talks. And we all have our quirks.
vmenon@thestar.ca