1. Also common to young women is what I think is called “broadening” the a sound. So “last” comes out as “lahst”.
   And “college” comes out as “cawllege”
   “Yes” is “yuss”.

2. YES! Unfortunately I am pretty sensitive to voice and the sounds emanating from The Cohort are excruciating.

   I have a theory. These young females have more societal status, power and freedom than almost any group of women in history. Yet, they have to attract men.
   Since straight males (of which I am not one) are apparently captured by forms of neotony, I postulate that these girls are trying to offset their actual and threatening power by sounding like little idiot Kupey dolls.

   PS Many young gay men do it, too. The terminal rising interrogative is the worst sign, but there’s a constricted sing-song intonation that accompanies this. It is loathesome unto my ears.

   Thanks for posting on it. I thought I was the only one who hated this.

3. I’ve heard “the voice,” too, and can’t stand it at all. Generally, neo, it does tend to be confined to the 25 and under, but I’ve heard it occasionally in older women, accompanied by a lot of fluttering and exaggerated helpless femininity. Probably interesting in a bed partner, I suppose, but actively annoying when you’re trying to do business with a woman who sounds like a cross between Shirley Temple and Scarlett O’Hara.

   And don’t even get me started on the spoiled “I’m a pretty princess, indulge me!” attitude of the early-twenties girl (I refuse to dignify them by calling them women).

4. Oh yes, God yes! It’s like fingernails on a black board. I think they should be gathered up and taken to the pound to be either adopted or euthanized. Or, minimally, a few surgical scars added to their vocal folds to thicken them. The eternal question: Where are/were their parents? Is this part of the new era “perfect as you are” mantra? Do teachers no longer teach normative speech behavior and/or refer sub-standard speech to clinicians?

5. EssEm Says: Well, there’s certainly no shortage of neotony these days. And I think your theory holds for young men and dirty old men–maybe that’s all there is. But I remember a friend commenting that God had in mind the best interests of older men lusting after nymphets: when He created the nymphets He gave them a voice.

   I wanted to comment briefly on your site, and use of “Kweer.” Bravo. I’ve always thought Queer Nation had the right idea. You take a stigmatized word and you popularize it, use it until it becomes just another word. In so doing, you deprive those who use the word to inflict injury of the weapon. (Of course, it’s a lot easier for a straight like me to advocate the policy than for those who have to wear out the stigma.)

   If only the PC freaks would understand this, we’d be much farther down the road in social relations. But it’s not clear to me they really want good social relations as opposed to a censor role.

6. There is a VERY easy explanation for all of this, but given the PC climate we have and the failure of the average person to accept things as they are, and not try to imagine and make imagination what they are, makes it not worth the effort to explain.

   Though I will give it a shot. WARNING! The explanation below is not going to make those with ideological views very happy. It may not make those without them very happy, but its at least an easy to understand cogent explanation. It stems from biology, evolutionary psychology, cultures REAL purpose, etc.

   All things that to some degree have been made a mish mosh in the publics mind, thanks to several groups with agendas in different areas of the problem. the most vociferous and dominant would be the feminist groups, as they are fulfilling the lefts desire to create an easily controlled matriarchy. one can actually read the papers on this, but they are as hard and convoluted and skewed as reading marx on acid, with the largest wackiness steming from the refusal to understand genetics as it is.

   Ok… here goes.

   Humans came from more primitive types. Recent findings are showing that larger more complex animals develop faster genetically. Humans are ‘advanced’ enough to have a VERY complex social system and to have a VERY complex ability to abstract so as to transfer talent across domains.

   However, between those prior version who were LESS integrated, and today’s versions which are extremely integrated a change happened. You can see that change in the lack of species homogeneity. Our morphisms are extreme across the species. From 3 feet tall to 7 feet tall, thin to fat, pretty to ugly. Meanwhile the morphisms of other species are very high and narrow with very little spread. Sometimes the spread is so small it’s almost impossible to identify and even sex them.

   What happened? What changed it? Why did we go from a homogeneous population to such a highly variable and individually oriented social system? Would you believe that the answer makes the fight between socialism and laissaize-faire a fight between contining the ‘diversity’, or in reducing it to a homogeneous herd in which everyone is equal and has the same abilities within a narrow set of differences. Like race horses. The fact that the leftist eugenics used race horses and other similar things to explain to their constituency this same thing.

   Ok.. so here is what changed.

   The criteria for success fractured.

   In a herd of deer, there is only one criteria for success.. Survival that leads to mating and avoidance of predators. That’s it. and since the predator is a different animal, they are both locked into a solution in which neither gets to outstrip the other totally. The herd has strength in numbers so it needs less intelligence, the predator needs to overcome another mind, not a mindless plant, and so they are smarter.

   So the first distinction that made us change is when we stopped being purely primate herd animals who foraged (gathered), and we became hunters. But as you can see, there are no super smart hunters in the world other than man. so what happened? Well, that’s easy. When a herd animal becomes a meat eater, who is easier to eat, their compatriots or another animal who is over developed to meet other predators? Man as a predator primate in the beginning could only compete for man as a food among other hunters. If they went after another animal man would not have an advantage to get to it, or think to exploit it.

   We became smarter because we ourselves was the animal trying to outstrip ourselves. animals become smarter by organizaing and dominating. But if its in a dance with another animal, it will level off at some functional level. if a predator gets too smart suddenly, the prey will be all eaten and that group of predators will also end. if a herd animal gets too smart, then the predators die out, the herd multiplies too much, the food fails, and they too die out. Can you say “Easter island”?

   However, if the predator and the herd animal is the same creature, then it becomes impossible for one to outstrip the other. they are in a constant dance.

   Ah… but then something beautiful happens… their intelligence outstrips the other predators… and now, it becomes EASIER to eat other animals, including other predators than it is to eat each other.

   We become bright enough that the output of inventiveness by an individual becomes a proxy for cannibalism. The smarter no longer eat the less smart, but the smarter now do better, and everyone benefits. The species now becomes less homogeneous.

   And a new phase enters. Instead of A almost always beats B, we get A can beat B which can beat C which can beat A, and all manner of combinations.

   You can see this change in history…

   Many other things happen that are way way too much involved for me to include, and maybe someday I will write it all up… but we will have to skip..

   this moved us from a single plane of action and solution, to a meta plane in which the success or failure is not vested in the same answer floating around some Lagrange point.

   we get smart enough to create many venues of success. And success becomes no longer just defined by survival, but degrees of survival from subsistence to having way way too much (a power law, not a Gaussian distribution. Its systemic, you cant fix it, unless you rehomogenize us back again).

   women who choose (even if forced, a woman chooses as accidents can happen to offspring to fix the problem in the long run), then find other reasons to choose.

   Rather than our population following paretos rule and creating harems with the over wealthy ones getting to be the icon of the next generation… and homogenizing us as 80% of the women, select from 20% of the men.

   We started defining success differently, and we started realizing that we have overcapacity. And that now most common men, the 80% are now wealthy enough that the choices between the people are not life and death choices, but choices about life in the abstract.

   I can be the wife of a warrior, and have that… or I can be the wife of a merchant.. the list goes on. The use of chiseled looks and fine differences in race horse man, made way for the more productive selection of skills and outcomes in context to merit. The inventive geek can now kill the massively strong genetic winner.

   Now this explanation is all over the place in time… but its an ongoing process that either progresses or regresses (we are regressing now).

   So foled into all this now are all the ways we measure success. We no longer only see success in some singular genetic king or queen, but we see it in many ways. We also learn to see proof, because we learn to trick the things that display proof.

   Anyway… all this is still in us. we have the more primitive old brain that is built for the herd and reflexes. It’s the animus in us. the rage machine… etc….

   We also have the newer brain, which is a promoter and inhibiting system that allows the system to medate the animus part and control it. when things are bad and too fast to think and do the outcome, reflexes, and animus comes forward… when there is more time, or more practice controlling it for benefit, then the animus can be a karate man, who can just stop and walk away.

   [I am making this very simple and pop to hopefully be a bit more fun, and easy to understand]

   Well, culture in many ways, or part of it, ends up being some mediator between the mind and the world. An interface. If the culture is “better” the people are healthier, more productive, and moving forward creatig more productive people who in turn fracture what it means to be successful more. (till we get to the point that a man in a wheel chair with ALS can be a better mate selection than a man who loads boxes!)

   Mind became the better selection criteria than the physical. And a good culture helps the minds push back the more primitive things, and push forward the less primitive things.

   But the system has no actual direction, it flows everywhere like mercury.

   So culture came up… and culture learned that if we hid our sexuality… we mediated it… then we pushed back the simple physical only selector, and we pushed forward the more progressive directed selector.

   We went from everyone going after the pretty people, to everyone going after the mind that was the best. and those that selected well and worked well in union had more kids and did better.

   So, contrary to the lefts assertions, the pushing down of sex was not a throw back, but a throw forward.

   Sex as a selector is in the animus brain. That brain has this as its foundation. To remove it is not possible unless there is a constant bias or force that makes that as a pure selector less productive.

   However, as any breeder will tell you, you pair off the better fit, and you get progressively better outcomes (Based on the selection criteria).

   Our species discovered that by selecting for successful qualities over physical form, ended up accelerating our progress forward and our mastery of the world. No longer would we need to eat each other to progress, but all we have to do is like a better life over a sexier partner.

   Its like sex is a 100 watt bulb… and around it are all these new qualities that came much much later. These new qualities are like colored leds. They are intelligence, attitude, abstraction ability, self control, personality, adaptabiity, sanity, etc… whatever you want to call them and mix them up, they are the the secondary selectors.

   Well, culture lets us shift the secondary selectors to primary ones, and it does that by dimming the ultrabright bulb.

   You want women and men to be selected by our smarts and such? Then you have to lock the key to sex away and keep the bright light from blocking the view of the other facets.

   Now we are starting to get to the reason that the voices and women hve changed.

   We have natures. And one of our key natures that is embodied in EVERY LIVING THING is competition and survival. There are other natures, but primary is the will to live, and we have connected that outcome to the mate choices we make.

   What our lives turn out to be is very much influenced by the choice of mate we select.

   The choice of mate we select has to do with the selection criteria we think is important.

   And now, here we go with the understanding.

   Our society, till the Frankfurt school and the communists was directed towards better mate selection. Looking over man and the different ways man chooses to join up, colors who we are, and the level of our species. Random selecting mates makes outcomes neutral… tall people mate with short people, and everything starts to average out. only selection by specific criteria either set by reality harshly, or by being able to predict an outcome and selecting by choice. If we do that, then we select for more than sexy, and more than just smarts, or tall, etc.

   We went through many different forms of mating, and the one that led to the most productive was monogamy. Mating is a sorting game, and monogamy forced each person to make the best match they can. If I have 300 wives, then I don’t have to be as careful. If I have only one chance and the future of my family is at stake, and its future for millennia, then what happens to my choice?

   Its all about taking life as serious as it really is.

   So the cultures as they got more productive also had lots of restrictions on sex, and the rules of pairings. You know, all the things that the feminists didn’t want because they claimed that it locked up womens sexuality.

   Yes it did. but the difference was the same as spending hand to mouth and what you get from that, and spending after saving for a long time and what you get for that.

   With sex off the table, what would then be the selection criteria? Well, then you only have to look at the gilded age to see where this would go. Men were a bit older because a woman/and family wanted some proof before committing. After all, she only has one chance to define the future of her family for eternity. All this proof and desire to make the best possible choice, led to the western cultures customs (and other cultures too but not in such sweet a mix).

   Her clothes covered her sex up. so whether you look at the Elizabethans with their voluminous outfits and bustles, or the Italians with a body covering and tiny windows on blank walls, or the burka, or the veil.

   All of these things are to create a filture to shut down the brightness of sex as a selector, and upgrade all the other selectors. Family for good genetic lineage and prediction of outcomes. Smarts and personality and talent… different cultures focused on different subsets. (this is also why the issues around these clothings are so mixed up. the feminists see the limitation of sex as bad, and a woman ina burka often finds that not having biological sex in play is more liberating… note that feminists wanted to cover women up too…. which is why many feminsts have switched to islam. But would you say unisex is a way to push down sex? So they didn’t free women they just wanted to replace one filter with another approved one)

   Ok… so now you have women covering up. women are going to school (contrary to what feminsits claim! It was when women wanted to have families after wwii that the roles dropped to the bottom, prior to that women were 47% of college entries, they are now 57-67%… but things are falling apart… which is another lecture on why), the reason is clear.

   A father who wants his daughter to have the best selection has toahve a daughter with real world skills and talents. This is VERY true today. while the herd animals are rutting like rabbits and dropping “womb turds” the wealthy and elite are still selecting carefully, still having a lot more kids, and still sending their daughters to expensive finishing schools in the swiss alps!!

   The American ideal was a classless society. we had the closest to it in the 50s. you see, in America, the people copied the elite. And because the bottom could earn, the bottom could aquire and reach the elite. Just read about the dislike between old money and new money to get this. so everyone in America wanted to use proper etiquette, not just the wealthy that went to finishing schools. Everyone was to be a king and queen in their own homes. So American life was so rich because we made all the good choices that the rich were making and did like them. (now this would never do since it allowed pigs to put on lipstick and come to the party. So they convinced us to live differently while they removed themselves from public view, and let lipsticked pigs with money take the center stage, while the really wealthy and dynastic just quietly moves on.)

   So in the 60s the culture was almost reset to the primitive herd level. we went back to being like the horse or the deer. We were told it was more modern, because it was different, it was a change. the restrictions that allowed the bottom to move up, were dismantled so that they would roll in the mud with each other in misery and pain and too distracted to climb out.

   So the sexual revolution took the shade off the bright light of sex. it claimed that it would bring a big freedom as we selected better. that women would be loved more for what they are (they just didn’t tell them what they were), and they used all these flowery terms.

   But it was a lie. With sex blinders off, it became a race to the bottom. a smart, talented, woman who was not a sex pot, lost out to the girl who jumped on the bar and stripped to entertain the men.

   The feminsits and the think tanks worked out how this would go, so the assertions were all lies. All revisions to reality to change behavior… to rot us out from the inside and set us back culturally to a thousand years before bc became ad. (this progressing change can be seen in the black society as these things went there first as part of the leftist eugenics plans, which as you can see here, are still going on, but softer).

   The sexier women who hated having to cover up because that meant they couldn’t trump another woman with what they were born with unrefined, but had to work on who they were as people to be the most attractive.

   The less attractive women, were the ones tha read the lies and said, wow, they will look at what I was born with and find that better. so they signed on.

   What you got was a bunch of women debasing themselves if they were sexy, and another bunch that the more they worked for the cause the more they were on the outs and bitter that the men didn’t see their real qualities. And if you saw the vagina monologues, you can see that this then might drive more of them into a same sex solution as the girls who wanted to be loved for these less biologically overwhelming indicators, went off to love each other for that.

   And now we are well along. so what about the voice?

   Well that’s easy… the animus of man has its primitive focal points, as does the animus of woman. take away the culture, and you get rutting herd animals. The women cant walk up and spout smarts and win, they lose to the sexier one that walks up to trump them.

   It doesn’t take too long for a woman to realize that she has to promote the things that show that she has better indicators. And if no one is selecting any more for smarts, skill, personality, etc. she will HAVE to switch or be left out of the party of life.

   So what does she do? she looks to history and sees which women were the winners in the competition when sex was the selector. Oh oh… and your right… the women that worked that side of the street were the Babylonian whores, and so forth.

   They would promote and play up all the MALE SEX SELECTION CUES, and that will overwhelm his more modern brain the same way that a serious situation makes us take a dump, pee, and run.

   The feminsts get a pool of disgruntled women that blame men for being animals.

   The males selectors are overwhelmed and he then does what the rutting deer do. since THOSE are part of the FEMALE SELECTION CUES.

   So to get the sexiest women, since sex is the best selector again, he has to be the sexier man. so the sexier woman becomes obsessed with secondary sexual characteristics and promoting that hers are better.

   She basically goes out and makes herself to the biggest sex toy that she can to get the time with the males, because no time with them, means your out of the game of life. Your missing the party.

   She dyes her hair. The dying alone says she doesn’t like herself and so is indecisive (a decisive woman will say no and that’s it, indecisive is sexier since no is a possible maybe which becomes a possible yes). She picks blonde since that is the color of youth. She goes for the redder and darker lipstics… which mimic menses and fertility so that her lips that she has that can be seen while standing are puffier, fuller, and engorged… (Angelina jolie is a lip freak). She shows her cleavage which mimics her butt. She exposes as much as she feels she can. She wears higher and higher heels… she wants to be younger so she takes on the affectations of children (Because we regress when in love, and so she pre-regresses and makes the distance to travel to that point seem instant to the male).

   The list goes on… but taken to the extreme which humans can do, you get women with basketball sized breast implants. Women wearing 7 inch platform heels that were considered the dirtiest fetish wear (oh, that’s why they unlocked the fetish as a limit, to remove the social limit to this). she wears micro mini skirts… hip huggers…

   Basically she exposes as much as she can get away with legally and emotionally (which is why women feel like crap when they go out now. the woman with no emotional limitation trumps them and they are frustrated by their own inability to pull a train like her and have the attention which can be changed into mate choice).

   She dresses like a child.. a catholic school girl maybe.. her voice raises in pitch.. she is now blonde.. etc.

   Meanwhile, the feminsits not on the top sit there and wonder what went wrong, not knowing that the answer is nothing, this was the intent.

   What you are watching and noticing is the bar slowly being lowered more and more.
   With the television and its propaganda pushing the limits to speed it up.

   But wait, the men have also responded. They now think of the women as whores, as they are only trading their birth sexuality for sex… the men know that there are better choices out there, but they only have this sex thing to really select by. the women that are in the game are too available, they cant be trusted by the male to invest in. they show off to attract evenwhen they are taken. They want things in exchange for showing stuff that isnt valuable anymore now that no one covers up (its actually funny in that so many generations working the game the other way has made her value herself and what she hides as a bait. but without culture as the mediator, the biological offer is there, but the valuie has bee let out of it)

   This little reversal of our genetics and the feedback systems it relies on will end up making the common man more like a herd horse. Socialism will make sure that the lowest ones have more of an advantage so that there are more of them. slowly it will divide the species into keepers and pets.

   You will once again have the elite lords on top.. they will have and own all the means of production the way a farmer does… and the common man, made into one heck of a good slave… not to mention a heck of a good sex toy too… (sounds like selecting slaves again, no?)

   This is what the left is creating, intentionally or not.

   And with the shades off sex, we care about that first.

   Meanwhile in the older system with a block on sex, we cared about the individual person more, and the sex came second.

   That’s why our grandparents could hope for a 65th wedding anniversary, and we cant get past the biological seven year itch, which our animal mind makes us seek a new mate rather than the old way of seeking to RENEW with our mate, who is the best choice we could possibly make.

   They took their choices really seriously, they understood that the child of a union was a product of that choice. We no longer take life seriously, and no longer believe in genetics and such, and so we no longer care if the child is a product of a union of the best choice.

   We have thug culture in response.. after all, the top thug in a gang is equivalent to the alpha male in a herd. We regress back to clans herds and warring against each other without a higher society around us.

   At that point.. it becomes easy for them to just cull the herd when there are problems.

   Now you know why womens voices are changing… they are rediscovering the basal selectors for an animal man, and no longer select for a human man.

7. terminal rising interrogative

   Perfect description. I’d thought it was a southern California thing, but apparently not. Here it is found among both sexes of the 15-20ish set, and not connected with sexual orientation.

   It drives me crazy. Every declarative sentence has the inflection of an interrogative, followed by the apparently obligatory air gulp and the next declarative sentence.

   Those adopting this affectation may yet be plucked from the gene pool. Several have come close…

8. Neoteny hypotesis is plausible, because imitation of childish behavior is one of the traits of domestication in mammals. As in any higher animal species, this behavior is intended to attract attention and suppress aggression. Coquettes in any age did this. So all young females now tend to behave like coquettes? No wonder, really. This is the spirit of age.

9. I recently read a study of dialects of birds songs in industrial landscapes. They also changed in this direction: higher pitch, accentuated phrases, larger volume. The authors suggested that this is an adaptation to industrial noise, to provide better communication at nise background.

10. I recommend Daria on MTV for the study of fashion trends in young female voices. See Quinn the Brain” for a hilarious example!

11. I can live with the tone of voice, but I am getting tired of the fact that the standard response to “thank you” in this cohort is no longer “you’re welcome” but “no problem.”

12. As a young girl I watched Lauren Bacall ask Humphrey Bogart if he knew how to whistle, and decided that was the voice to have.

    Maybe we should be playing Lauren Bacall movies to the very young.

13. I have heard the voice. I thought maybe I was the only one who really found it all that annoying. Makes me want to slap someone.

14. I think there’s a very simple reason for the phenomenon: social interaction and wanting to belong. Period. Some of us — who have long memories — can recall the late 60’s/early 70’s affectations punctuated by “Psychadelic!” “Cool, man…..” etc. and various of-the-moment phraseology while the cadence was a drawn out prounouncing of the word as if in slow motion…perhaps to imitate (or indicate) the state of being “high” on drugs, a major preoccupation of the times.

    The same explanation applies in many gay social circles or certain professions which tend to draw many gay men. I went to Parsons School of Design, and I distinctly remember observing any number of male students starting school with no “terminal rising interrogative” ( great descriptive phrase EssEm), nasal intonations, overuse of exclamatory declarations (“Mah-velous!” “Simply FAB-ulous…”) and highly accented pronunciation. However, it was quite fascinating to observe the changeover to a completely different manner of speech; i.e. it was so apparent one could not miss it!

    We’ve also gone through periods in which young people adapted various other speech mannerisms: Remember the “Valley Girl?” And how about young guys doing the somewhat dim surfer guy emulations: “Hey, dude….” “Cool, man…” invoking a lower voice, and semi-conscious manner, as if due to brain damage from too many near-drowning incidents.

    And let’s not forget the ol’ HipHop influence: When I started hearing my nieces and nephews greeting me with “Whassup?” and various other new examples of new meanings for old words: “Bling,” “That’s phat!” — I just heard “fat” and for the longest time didn’t have a clue…”Come “ovah” to my crib…”

    Generally, I think the adaptation of the various lingos and mannerisms is a result of a basic social instinct: wanting to belong.

    Thankfully, most grow out of it and we look back at the various speech patterns as evocative of specific periods of time.

15. What a relief! I’ve been seriously worried lately that I’d somehow become a raging sexist, thinking, as I was, that many Women are now sounding to me just like Children, only mysteriously louder. Whew….

16. I’m betting a striking correlation between Daddy paying for school, cars and the latest electronic gadgets, having something to do with it all.

    When you lack the proper adversity to become your own person, you find telltale ways of showing people you really don’t have a problem with uniqueness.

17. Humans is the only species that domesticated itself, and this process of self-domestication is still going on, with subsequent infantilisation.

18. good point sergey…
    after all, i have been trying to point out the new farmers… the ones that will own everyting and take care of us…

    though unleashing sex is a race to the bottom as all other qualities are ignored. (till its too late)

19. My daughter (18) has noticed another speech trend among teen girls: the mumbly voice. Their words are half-swallowed; their mouths barely move. Very annoying. She and her sister (16) have avoided picking that up, probably because they’ve been homeschooled.

20. The high pitch has been and is a common affectation among Japanese women and is very common in Japanese anime, which our youth have been absorbing at an increasing rate over the last thirty years.

    I don’t know if there’s a real connection, but I thought it was interesting.

21. Here’s another theory: Have you heard how parents today talk to their kids, as in “Melissa, we mustn’t scream in the restaurant….okay?” and “Jason, don’t run out into traffic….okay?” That ubiquitous “Okay?”!

22. I agree with cSimon. The lilt didn’t exist before the late sixties when getting high became much more common. My recollection was that people seemed more driven by the need to sound hip than anything more fundamental. Regretably, it has been a lower common denominator with all the attendant seductions. Even with my own kids (14 and 16) I fight a losing battle aginst the use of “like” as puncutation.

23. Link

    Is this the voice you were looking for, Neo?

24. The mumbling!! I have a tween who watches Disney incessantly whenever the TV is on, and it drives me frickin’ crazy that the young actors, primarily the young female actors, cannot seem to enunciate to save their lives. My favorite example: At one point in High School Musical, the drama teacher says, “And besides, we have not got a pi-AN-ist,” with flawless diction (as well as careful consideration of how the word “pianist” can be misunderstood if not well pronounced). The little girl pi-AN-ist (who I understand is actually one of the older members of the cast) rushes up: “Yes we do – penis here, Ms. Darbis!” Swear to goodness, that’s what it sounds like.

    Don’t even get me started on Ashley Tisdale. I expect to have to listen to Shakespeare or singing multiple times in order to catch every word; I don’t expect that when the script is written in ordinary modern English. Would you youngsters move your lips, please!

    Rant off…

25. Many Hollywood movies mumble like crazy. I literally cannot make out what they are saying without subtitles. Sometimes I can’t even make it without with rewind.

    Young generations that keep watching movies and get their speaking cues from entertainment will naturally follow what the monkey sees.

26. Darn, I wanted to be the one to mention the Japanese phenomenon. Of course, “phenomenon” may not be appropriate here, since it has been an established norm for females to affect higher-pitched voices in Japanese culture for centuries.

    I also see a connection with the recent emergence of Japanese pop culture in America.

    As for mumbly-voice, I must bow to others’ expertise.

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