Male upspeak…
I’ve noticed it among the young.
I’m a woman, but I’m not an upspeaker. That’s because I’m old.
And very opinionated. Polite, but opinionated.
And I don’t like upspeak, in men or women.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
Oh, gawd! I like noticed lately? On Wall Street Journal This Morning? It’s sounded as if they like hired school girls before? At least for a couple of years? But like a few weeks ago? I started noticing that the men? Were doing it, like, too?
They sound as they are asking a non stop string of questions.
MAKE A STATEMENT, DAMNIT!
Lee:
That’s because all truth is like, relative?
I hadn’t noticed, possibly because I associate with a bunch of old farts. Oops, I mean senior citizens.
This verbal tic drives me nuts. My daughter picked it up from her cousin, and I’m trying to wring it out of her. Between that and the absurd “like” used as punctuation, she was starting to sound like a brainless SoCal twit.
So far, reading The Hobbit as a family is helping.
If one listens carefully to the manner of someone’s speech you can discern how they think.
‘Nuff said.
Upspeak struck me as of Scandinavian origin, when I heard it a lot in Minnesota. “I yam Svedish?” But only by femmes.
If memory serves, upspeak was featured in the female protagonist in the Coen’s movie “Fargo”, which came out 15 or more years ago.
Ugh, that’s a shame.
Please don’t let the vocal fry migrate to young men too.
I’m sure the campus feminists are very happy with this. After all there’s no real difference between the sexes. After all you can be, like, any gender you want?
Me, neither? You damn betcha!
Metrosexual. Emasculation. Female dominance. ‘White’ guilt. Social ‘justice’. It’s all of a piece.
Lizzy,
I really didn’t know what vocal fry was until I saw and heard Jill Abramson interviewed by Greta Van Sustern the other night. It was unbelievable!
I used a clicker counter to count the “likes” on Reality TV shows.
I called it the “like-o-meter.”
Broke my girls from using the word.
The best time of life to engage this vocal mannerism is when one is in 3rd grade or lower. It’s cute when kids do it.
But unless one is in a Three Stooges short, childish behavior by adults is more off-putting than funny.
I know this. Oh, my. Yes I do.
It’s, like, not permanent? A fellow I know was doing the upspeak thing in 2011, then got married and gained some confidence. Met him again this month and it was gone, hardly a trace left.
Bunch Gamma/Delta males that seem to be deciding things for society.
Boys today are growing up at alarming slow pace.
I’ve said it before- if we’re suddenly faced with a situation where we rely on our youthful, earring studded, manicured, pajama boy-men to defend us from actual outside threats,
we are like, soooo screwed.
Like , ya know .. Jesus H Christ, next thing you know, the young male role models will be skinny hairless creatures who have difficulty holding their heads up…
Oh my god. Like I’m so old, I can’t even learn how to do male upspeak?
Neo, have you heard the latest about Honduras?
Obama has declared that he’s going to, by Executive Decree, natch, send PLANES to Honduras to pick up “children” there, rather than waiting for them to traverse Mexico — and fly them directly to the United States!!!
Rush L. has the skinny. Talked about it today (transcript here). He said he never thought the Obama Admin. would become actual coyotes, but he can’t keep up with their malfeasance.
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/07/25/barack_obama_coyote_in_chief
Now, what’s the connection to Obama’s other Activities in Honduras, keeping the leftist Zelaya in power?
He picked up the story from the NY Times.
I stutter and stumble and murmur and pause when I’m talking to people I don’t know (it’s a social anxiety thing, I’m working on it), but the words I DO manage to get out there are matter-of-fact, at least.
Except, come to think of it, when I need confirmation that the listener knows what I’m talking about. “I tried that building across the street–the green one with the red door? [wait for nod] But it’s locked up and nobody seems to be inside.”
Seems to me like a social cue; as if you are gaging the emotional connectedness of your interlocutor.
If so, it would be a technique for establishing/maintaining group cohesiveness. For promoting groupthink, of a sort.
Not a positive trend, but OTOH, we’re talking about younger people. Maybe they’ll grow out of wanting to be in the “popular” clique.
Maybe they’ll grow out of wanting to be in the “popular” clique.
I used to think that, but I’m hearing it more and more often in adult women who learned to speak that way as teens.
Listen to that new spokesbubble from the State department, Jen Psaki. She sounds like a 14-year-old girl and not just because of the upspeak (the content is pretty juvenile, too).
Most female newsreaders sound like Valley Girls, too. I guess they stopped teaching diction in J-school, if they ever did.
The Gillette commercial diagramming a male body, and how it’s to be shaved. Why? I’ve been scraping my face for forty years, and started by watching my father. He did not inform me that any other parts were to be hairless. I’m just so disgusted.
” He did not inform me that any other parts were to be hairless. I’m just so disgusted.”
I mentioned this a few years back on a related thread Neo had put up. Every spring when the winter melts away the students on college campuses by natural right flock outside on a warm spring day for lounging, frisbee, etc. A few years back it suddenly struck me that there must be some strange gene thing going on as NONE of the guys had any chest hair. I then realized the extent of the depilatory craze.
It’s cultural shift. I asked my daughters about it last year and they both expressed disgust with the idea that a guy would have chest hair. All I could think of was those women back in the early 60’s swooning over Sean Connery’s manly display of chest hair in the 007 movies.
Dude! Like, get a cool haircut and, uh, stay unemployed.
http://www.barbershopconnect.com/detail/014921/best-15-lizard-mohawk-haircut-design/#content-14921
Re: chest hair–my mother and I were actually just talking about that the other day, and she said that she finds it off-putting when men shave it. I said I’d never really cared one way or another, and she said that it was just because I grew up in a culture where men shaving or waxing their torsos was normal, and that she personally just couldn’t see it as being at all masculine or attractive.
I raised an eyebrow and mentioned Vin Diesel, and she snorted and said, “Well, he can make up for it.”
So, apparently, men can only get away with it if they’re bodybuilders.
(I do think it’s just a cultural thing, though, sort of like women shaving their legs. Some people find smooth skin more appealing. Shaved chest hair doesn’t ping very high on my scale of worrisome cultural trends.)
The City pool where I swim in winter has a shower room, of course, and one day, I met a French guy there, in town for a company thing, (Austin/Round Rock, international computer connections). I noticed two things, one, unlike most Americans, he did not use a towel or turn away when he bared the genitalia, and two, he was bald down there. Naturally, I did not ask him pour quoi? However, maybe this degeneracy started in France? It would just figure.
here is the young woman director of the serious film “dangerous acts starring the unstable elements of belarus”. She upspeaks.
Until a human accepts dying alone, they will always seek social groups for safety, physically or emotionally. Age doesn’t remove that desire.
Shaved chest hair doesn’t ping very high on my scale of worrisome cultural trends.)
Her point seemed to be that it was about masculinity, but that the concept itself involves several scales. So if a person did that, but had a relatively high social index and physical strength, like Diesel, it doesn’t matter if he is eccentric in other matters or feminine. Because what matters is the overall balance. And if society shunts that balance one way, then there’s nothing to make up for the hair thing. Strength? Ability to protect others? Do they have such in abundance to make up for deficiencies elsewhere?
“Up speak” among young adults appears to be different, but somewhat related, to “vocal fry.”
Sometimes, if you are really lucky, it’s possible to encounter both in the same person. Sad to say, I have had this experience (I work on a college campus).
Jill Abrahamson has a terrible case of vocal fry. Chelsea Clinton does also, and when combined with her pompous self-regard it’s downright unbearable to listen to her speak IMO.
Thing about upspeak is that it mimics a question. So we have an assertion intoned as a question. The listener has to figure out which it is, and if it’s an assertion of fact, it sounds as if the speaker is saying, “Maybe this is it, what do you think, or maybe not.” Damages credibility, clarity, authority.
Jill Abrahamson’s speech is awful. Nobody can do that by accident. She had to have learned it for some reason and hasn’t dropped it. Eeesh.
I really can’t bear this! I am middle-aged and apparently, not much of an upspeaker either and have been tagged by some male upspeakers as being slightly “neanderthal”. Which I take as a compliment coming from them, but good lord, it doesn’t take much to stand out as a manly man if all the guys around you sound like postmodern ninnies. It is not even a “gay accent” really, which I have heard a lot of having been around gay men most of my adult life, there is too much edge to that, and a more brittle quality– the humor is cutting. This is usually or just as often straight men and it is very non-committal, and nothing is ever a statement. NOTHING IS EVER A STATEMENT! I noticed it about ten years ago and it is spreading – hah. It really grates on my nerves.