I might be deaf to this. I watched the interview with some girl I never heard of and, although I found her very annoying for several reasons, I couldn't hear the "creaky voice" thing.
What is the point in mentioning that you've never heard of Zooey Deschanel, a popular celebrity (who starred in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)? Does that add something to your comment, or are you just trying to show proud you are of being out of touch with popular culture?
It's odd that your own website has a movie section and a link to IMDB and several movie critics [1] and yet you're here on HN trying to show off pretending that you're so far removed that you have to go out of your way to explain to random people that you don't know who this person is when no one asked if you knew and knowing who she is isn't even relevant to the topic.
Do you walk down the street telling passers-by that you don't follow celebrities? Is it that important to you?
No, but I was in the supermarket the other day and noticed that almost every magazine in the checkout area had the same woman on the cover, so I asked my wife, "Who is this Kim Kardashian?" She didn't know, either. Is she an actress, too?
And, I should really update that page. It's ancient! - doesn't even follow my current style.
Recognition and recall are different things. You can recognize an actor in a film without knowing their name, and you can recognize a name without knowing who the person is.
I'm not freeunter and it's not important to me but it is obnoxious; that being someone going out of their way to make themselves seem above something or someone else when no one asked nor cares.
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[Ignore below. I misread the comments but I'm leaving for context. I think the above comment stands without the evidence below.]
Quoting from above:
some girl I never heard of
... and below:
I hear about her all the time
He may not know that she's an actress but it's clear he had previously "heard of" her and lying only makes it more obnoxious. It's the same behavior you can read about in The Onion link.
That's dishonest. You know quite well that, above, I was referring to the actress interviewed in the article under discussion, and, below, to Kardashian, who, you must know, is not the same person. To accuse me of lying by lying about what I said is pretty contemptible.
EDIT: And if they are the same person, you can hardly blame me. The lady on all the magazines looks totally different from the one in the interview. How could I know?
> That's dishonest. You know quite well that, above, I was referring to the actress interviewed in the article under discussion, and, below, to Kardashian
I'm sorry. I honestly missed that. That was meant as evidence to support that you were in fact doing what i was describing. I mistakenly accused you of lying but it still seems the behavior fits (EDIT: not lying rather the behavior in the first paragraph of my original comment).
You're piling more contemptible behavior on top of what you already did, while pretending to apologize. So you admit you were wrong, and have no evidence that I lied, but are tying to suggest that I'm a liar anyway with the ambiguous phrase "it still seems the behavior fits". Amazing.
You know other people can see your comments, right? Not just me?
No it was genuine. I don't think you lied at all and I apologized for it.
> but are tying to suggest that I'm a liar anyway with the ambiguous phrase "it still seems the behavior fits".
Re-read my original comment. The behavior I'm talking about is what is above the edit, not lying, but I can see how you would have that mistaken interpretation. I'm not having my best day with communication.
> You know other people can see your comments, right? Not just me?
You don't need to know who the person is to be able to hear what they sound like. When I first heard of this effect it was a sound clip of a blogger with whom I am not familiar with, but I got the gist of it without knowing her identity.
The point is the what, not the who. They could have put any affected female in her place without changing anything.
Care to elaborate? I watched the clip and didn't find it off-putting except for the shallow personality traits that I associate with her vocal mannerisms, which was kind of the point of the article.
Maybe I'm more crotchety than you and find "shallow personality traits" and certain "vocal mannerisms" more annoying. These were not the point of the article, which was about one particular vocalization, which I could not detect. What was "very annoying" to me? The vocal tic of saying "like" every three words, the constant tossing of the head and hair, the speaking in a tumble of disconnected, cliched fragments rather than in sentences, the general vapidity, the garish makeup, etc.
I suppose this behaviour is designed, perhaps sub-consciously, to influence the opinions held by others of the speaker. To encourage them to 'like' the speaker.
We can all control how we talk, but some seem more conscious of it than others. As someone who (thinks he) can notice a switch in vocal register like any other obvious pattern change, the behaviour also screams out to me each time I see or hear it. But I don't dislike it; the speaker merely has a job to do and a social environment to fit into.
I hear something similar in some (particularly American) men. It's an over-emphasis of the depth of their voice. I think I've noticed a fair few others over the years but there are likely a million other traits in people of all ages that I've never noticed. All designed to influence the listener in some way. After all, people don't typically speak to grandparents the same way they speak to friends. Why not?
It's probably a primal, perhaps evolutionary behavioural trait, but my point is that it's not specific to vapid celebs. We probably all do it to some degree.
'"I ne saugh nawiht" in Middle English; "I don't see anything" in Modern English. Today, one can find it in French, which negates verbs by affixing the particles ne and pas to either side of the verb, as well as in Afrikaans, Greek, and a number of Slavic languages. The point: There is nothing inherently "ignorant" or "stupid" about double negation; judgments about speech are judgments about the speakers themselves.'
There is nothing inherently English about Greek and a number of Slavic languages. There ain't nothing much that Afrikaans tells us about the practice of Modern English (is there, baas?) and only so much light that Middle English sheds.
Double negation is also a feature of modern English; the point is no one can claim speakers of Middle English, French, Afrikaans et cetera are ignorant or unintelligent.
No, but it's disingenuous to claim people who consider the speaker to be ignorant are only taking into account the double-negation, when the phrase contains a combination of multiple factors, such as language and content.
That is very much the point, I think. You can't judge the speech negatively on its merits, since emphatic negation is a regular feature of many languages. You can judge the speech negatively on the basis of who you think the person is, in this case "black".
There are some obvious issues with confusing these things.
You can't judge the speech negatively on its merits, since emphatic negation is a regular feature of many languages.
But the speech isn't in "many languages", it's in a particular language where the double-negation is considered incorrect, therefore there's no need to make assumptions about race or background to consider the speaker ignorant.
Emphatic double negation is not considered incorrect in African American English or other English dialects where it appears. It is used regularly and correctly, which is no surprise since it is a feature of many languages. The reason it is called incorrect is because these are historically the dialects of impoverished and oppressed groups. This is, again, the point and the problem.
Academically speaking, that is a matter of some debate. Pragmatically speaking, it's easy-- are they speaking the language they grew up speaking? Then it's correct. What you call "broken English", assuming native speakers, are just poor (i.e. impoverished) dialects.
To be clear on what I'm saying, an AAVE speaker can attempt to speak some other dialect and fail, producing broken constructions similar to non-native speech. But almost none of the speech labeled as such falls into that category.
Thanks for the note! Although I don't think it makes it a bad example, there's no requirement that a double construction always be used in order to count. It being perceived as correct when used is enough.
Right--although the only speakers of Middle English that I've actually met were reading Chaucer out loud in a college class. So we've got it out of the way about them being ignorant or unintelligent.
I don't judge any particular speaker of French or Afrikaans to be ignorant or unintelligent. I do however judge that while they are speaking French or Afrikaans they are not speaking English.
I have a sore memory of a recent lengthy debate on the concept of dialects, so suffice it here to say: It is utterly uncontroversial among linguists that AAVE, among other dialects which use double negation for emphasis, is a real English that young black kids grow up and learn to speak properly. It is not Standard in the sense that it is not used in news or government, and its use in formal speech will leave one branded ignorant, but it is in all other respects the relative equal of the English you speak.
If you have criticisms, that's fine, but again, this is the scientific consensus and not my area of expertise-- I'll have to direct you to Wikipedia.
It's a fuzzy line-- the old adage "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" is more or less accurate. If you're the official language of a country or religion, or are used extensively in business or politics, you get to be "Standard". If you're only spoken by a sub-national cultural group, or appear only in "informal" media and popular culture, you're just a dialect. The distinction itself actually is controversial, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(linguistics)
Not that there's anything wrong with having a standard language for business or politics, as long as you don't think that says something about people who grew up in the wrong place or class.
I think I get all that. So is there room for the idea of a vernacular that is not a "real English", to use your term? Or not the "relative equal" of Standard English? Can there be, or are there in the wild, vernaculars that are something other than these things?
Absolutely, and I would take jargons as an example. American Legal English is a kind of English, but it's not "real" in the sense that there are ideas in English that it can't properly express, and vice versa, and even skilled legal practitioners frequently make inconsistent mistakes. This is predicted by the fact that it is learned in adulthood; the language has no native speakers. Conversely, among languages spoken from birth, we expect and find that they are internally consistent and of roughly equivalent expressive value.
As a native speaker of a Slavic language who has studied English and currently attempts to learn French I find this entire premise a little baffling.
Typically, a Slavic speaker who has just begun learning English tries to make a linguistic calque and says "I don't see nothing". The teachers would then repeatedly make the point that "there is no double negation in English and you must use 'any' in that case".
Similarly, the use of 'ne' in French is more nuanced. Used alone, it may not convey any negative meaning at all (ne explétif) except when paired with just seven verbs (ne littéraire). I would not therefore call 'ne .. pas' a 'double negative'. A double negative would be "Ce n'est pas rien" which works the same way as 'I do not disagree' in English. This does not reinforce the negative meaning like in Slavic languages but resolves to a positive instead. In addition, in spoken informal French the 'ne' is often dropped and 'pas' is the only indicative of negation (e.g Je sais pas).
The article then goes off on some weird tangent on how patriarchal society feels threatened by the linguistic innovations of the teenage slang. I don't even know.
The point the author is making that language is a convention and that different languages (and older versions of the same language) may use different conventions. Using a non-standard convention thus is no reason to infer ignorance or stupidity. Non-standard speech in and of itself only tells us that the speaker is preferring unconventional English to conventional English; this may be for a number of reasons, such as a perceived stiffness of dictionary English or its inability to capture nuances or elements of communication important to the speaker.
Related is Max Weinreich's quip: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" (or, in the original Yiddish: "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot").
Also fun to try: justifying ones use of "innit" as a general purpose tag with reference to the french "n'est-ce pas." This drives people up the wall, as there's no comeback to it, and it invokes the shallow europhilism which the kind of person who tells me off for saying "innit" typically indulges in constantly.
True, but that would overlook the other purpose of linguistic tags like that, which is to improve the rhythm of speech. The french know all about this.
The author never makes a case for why vocal fry might be warranted.
I personally find vocal fry to be annoying because it's the linguistic version of slouching. Support your voice properly and clearly speak so the other person can hear you. Vocal fry is just another manifestation of "I'm cool because I don't care."
If we assume that speakers have conscious control over both their words and manner of delivery, then the sentence can be read as "what is the intent of the speaker who uses vocal fry", and not "what external authority has approved the use of this manner of speech." Your response reads like you were looking to get offended / pick a fight.
> If we assume that speakers have conscious control over both their words and manner of delivery
Whoa, whoa, back up. Why should we assume that? Some level of control, sure. Nowhere near absolute.
And yeah, I'm offended by anyone who tries to critique the way other people talk while at the same time going around talking the way they talk all willy-nilly without concern for who they might be annoying.
It's speech. Everyone has inner thoughts and feelings they want to express. If they're trying to communicate in good faith, just let it go.
I can't speak for OP, but you insist on reading it as a criticism, when it seems to me more of a question in the spirit of scientific inquiry - at what times does a user of the "vocal fry" consider it appropriate? In the linked interview with Zooey Deschanel, she's not using it with every word she speaks. So I think it's natural for someone unfamiliar with this speech pattern to wonder why it's used in some places and not others. Is that a verboten question?
I'm sorry if you feel I spoke too stongly, but if so it is because I feel strongly that your attempt to impute moral value to a vocal feature you know little about is unfounded and frankly oppressive.
If you'd like to have a conversation about that, you can start by defining your terms: Who or what "warrants" an arbitrary feature of your speech in whatever way you feel the fry is "unwarranted"?
I'm not sure how you're bringing morality into this. I'm simply viewing speech as communication and nothing more. Vocal fry increases noise in the signal to noise ratio, and I don't see how that could be useful.
Slouching = laziness = a moral value, dude. The point is it's not a choice, and even if it were if efficiency were a primary driver of language then we wud all b ritin lk dis n im gesin u dont car 4 dat ether.
> Had [old white dudes] been the ones to pioneer these tics, we'd be praising them as enriching expansions of the language. We'd be reading The, Like, New Yorker
I wasn't aware (and still don't care) which social group started adding "like" to everything; the reason it bothers me is that it adds noise without adding signal...
(Though I'm not a linguist; maybe there is some signal there that I'm just not consciously aware of?)
It can contain signal when used as a hedge ("The restaurant is only, like, five miles from here.") but generally that usage just substitutes for 'uh' or 'um' while signaling some group-membership (originally Valley Girl I think?)
Personally I've observed many meanings in use. As an adverb it means "figuratively" or "approximately". As a hedge word it more generally disclaims that what follows may be inaccurate or metaphorical. It's used in the place of "to say" or "to impart", filling in for the lack of a word which applies equally to text messages as to speech, with the implication (since it's a hedge) that the quoted speech is likely re- or paraphrased. It can be used as a mild intensifier, as in, "Okay, but, like..."; despite what you may think, simply adding weight to a phrase can and does alter it semantically. So it's a very versatile word, and there are other uses I've missed. And of course, it is used purely as a stall (er, a disfluency), though not heavily outside of a few dialects.
All of this falls under the linguistic study of "discourse", the way humans talk in real-world communication with each other. In linguistics, rules of discourse are real and as important as rules of grammar. Nobody uses only "approved" words or meanings of words or interactions of words; the ideas human beings communicate are more complex than that.
Having laid all that out, I'll say something you'll probably find challenging: the real reason you don't like it is because you don't know what it means. Which is of course the point of it, and the reason to label it as innovation.
That's the reason I'd give if pressed. But as the article shows, people are inclined to give a lot of reasons that don't hold up. There's a pattern to who's giving the reasons and who's on the receiving end that suggest that there's something else going on.
For example, "like" is often used as a replacement for "um" or "er". But "like" bothers me more. And different cultures have different noises for that; one of my small delights is figuring out what country somebody is from by which noise they use to indicate that they are holding the floor but need a second to think. I actively enjoy those, even though they're equally low-signal. And there's a lot of word-compression slang (e.g., "totes" for "totally", "prolly" for "probably") that increases the signal, so in theory I'd like it.
Thinking about it, a lot of the linguistic features that really bother me are exactly what the NORM pattern indicates: I don't like the ones from people with lower social standing. E.g., "ain't" as a class marker. I'm inclined to argue for the ones that privilege me (educated older white male), and against the ones that don't.
I sure hope next generation's NORMs won't speak in creaky voices. This looks a lot more like another cycle of fashion than true "ingenious" "innovation". What society-wide improvements in communication does it effect?
If you can't hear it in Zooey Deschanel's voice, a desk clerk with extravagant vocal fry was a gag in the movie Young Adult. Here's just a part of the scene (2nd clip on the page)
82 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadDo you walk down the street telling passers-by that you don't follow celebrities? Is it that important to you?
[1] http://lee-phillips.org/info/movies/movies.html
And, I should really update that page. It's ancient! - doesn't even follow my current style.
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[Ignore below. I misread the comments but I'm leaving for context. I think the above comment stands without the evidence below.]
Quoting from above:
... and below: He may not know that she's an actress but it's clear he had previously "heard of" her and lying only makes it more obnoxious. It's the same behavior you can read about in The Onion link.EDIT: And if they are the same person, you can hardly blame me. The lady on all the magazines looks totally different from the one in the interview. How could I know?
I'm sorry. I honestly missed that. That was meant as evidence to support that you were in fact doing what i was describing. I mistakenly accused you of lying but it still seems the behavior fits (EDIT: not lying rather the behavior in the first paragraph of my original comment).
You know other people can see your comments, right? Not just me?
No it was genuine. I don't think you lied at all and I apologized for it.
> but are tying to suggest that I'm a liar anyway with the ambiguous phrase "it still seems the behavior fits".
Re-read my original comment. The behavior I'm talking about is what is above the edit, not lying, but I can see how you would have that mistaken interpretation. I'm not having my best day with communication.
> You know other people can see your comments, right? Not just me?
Yes, I'm quite aware.
EDIT: PS I haven't heard (of) her before either
The point is the what, not the who. They could have put any affected female in her place without changing anything.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/12/vocal-fry-cree...
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/vocalfryshort.mp3
I now feel like anyone who cares about this is unhealthily nitpicking.
Or is she singing a whole song with vocal fry? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ThRVUcmSa0 (Dream a Little Dream of Me)
Care to elaborate? I watched the clip and didn't find it off-putting except for the shallow personality traits that I associate with her vocal mannerisms, which was kind of the point of the article.
We can all control how we talk, but some seem more conscious of it than others. As someone who (thinks he) can notice a switch in vocal register like any other obvious pattern change, the behaviour also screams out to me each time I see or hear it. But I don't dislike it; the speaker merely has a job to do and a social environment to fit into.
I hear something similar in some (particularly American) men. It's an over-emphasis of the depth of their voice. I think I've noticed a fair few others over the years but there are likely a million other traits in people of all ages that I've never noticed. All designed to influence the listener in some way. After all, people don't typically speak to grandparents the same way they speak to friends. Why not?
It's probably a primal, perhaps evolutionary behavioural trait, but my point is that it's not specific to vapid celebs. We probably all do it to some degree.
There is nothing inherently English about Greek and a number of Slavic languages. There ain't nothing much that Afrikaans tells us about the practice of Modern English (is there, baas?) and only so much light that Middle English sheds.
There are some obvious issues with confusing these things.
But the speech isn't in "many languages", it's in a particular language where the double-negation is considered incorrect, therefore there's no need to make assumptions about race or background to consider the speaker ignorant.
The speech is correct.
To be clear on what I'm saying, an AAVE speaker can attempt to speak some other dialect and fail, producing broken constructions similar to non-native speech. But almost none of the speech labeled as such falls into that category.
Not to mean that says anything about double negatives, but French probably shouldn't be used as an example of them.
I don't judge any particular speaker of French or Afrikaans to be ignorant or unintelligent. I do however judge that while they are speaking French or Afrikaans they are not speaking English.
If you have criticisms, that's fine, but again, this is the scientific consensus and not my area of expertise-- I'll have to direct you to Wikipedia.
Not that there's anything wrong with having a standard language for business or politics, as long as you don't think that says something about people who grew up in the wrong place or class.
Typically, a Slavic speaker who has just begun learning English tries to make a linguistic calque and says "I don't see nothing". The teachers would then repeatedly make the point that "there is no double negation in English and you must use 'any' in that case".
Similarly, the use of 'ne' in French is more nuanced. Used alone, it may not convey any negative meaning at all (ne explétif) except when paired with just seven verbs (ne littéraire). I would not therefore call 'ne .. pas' a 'double negative'. A double negative would be "Ce n'est pas rien" which works the same way as 'I do not disagree' in English. This does not reinforce the negative meaning like in Slavic languages but resolves to a positive instead. In addition, in spoken informal French the 'ne' is often dropped and 'pas' is the only indicative of negation (e.g Je sais pas).
The article then goes off on some weird tangent on how patriarchal society feels threatened by the linguistic innovations of the teenage slang. I don't even know.
Like, this point isn't new... Why it is rejected with different rates across scientific disciplines is entertaining.
Humans are entertaining when they look intellectually surprised.
Related is Max Weinreich's quip: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" (or, in the original Yiddish: "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot").
Plus I just like saying it.
EDIT: typo
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004914.php
I personally find vocal fry to be annoying because it's the linguistic version of slouching. Support your voice properly and clearly speak so the other person can hear you. Vocal fry is just another manifestation of "I'm cool because I don't care."
I bet this all fits well into NORM dialectics.
We may need 911 to help these idiolects.
I pushed the literal button.
"We shouldn't be afraid of a few glyphs on a screen."
Whoa, whoa, back up. Why should we assume that? Some level of control, sure. Nowhere near absolute.
And yeah, I'm offended by anyone who tries to critique the way other people talk while at the same time going around talking the way they talk all willy-nilly without concern for who they might be annoying.
It's speech. Everyone has inner thoughts and feelings they want to express. If they're trying to communicate in good faith, just let it go.
> Vocal fry is just another manifestation of "I'm cool because I don't care."
is in the spirit of scientific inquiry and not a value judgment, then I probably need to get some fresh air.
If you'd like to have a conversation about that, you can start by defining your terms: Who or what "warrants" an arbitrary feature of your speech in whatever way you feel the fry is "unwarranted"?
I wasn't aware (and still don't care) which social group started adding "like" to everything; the reason it bothers me is that it adds noise without adding signal...
(Though I'm not a linguist; maybe there is some signal there that I'm just not consciously aware of?)
It can contain signal when used as a hedge ("The restaurant is only, like, five miles from here.") but generally that usage just substitutes for 'uh' or 'um' while signaling some group-membership (originally Valley Girl I think?)
All of this falls under the linguistic study of "discourse", the way humans talk in real-world communication with each other. In linguistics, rules of discourse are real and as important as rules of grammar. Nobody uses only "approved" words or meanings of words or interactions of words; the ideas human beings communicate are more complex than that.
Having laid all that out, I'll say something you'll probably find challenging: the real reason you don't like it is because you don't know what it means. Which is of course the point of it, and the reason to label it as innovation.
That's the reason I'd give if pressed. But as the article shows, people are inclined to give a lot of reasons that don't hold up. There's a pattern to who's giving the reasons and who's on the receiving end that suggest that there's something else going on.
For example, "like" is often used as a replacement for "um" or "er". But "like" bothers me more. And different cultures have different noises for that; one of my small delights is figuring out what country somebody is from by which noise they use to indicate that they are holding the floor but need a second to think. I actively enjoy those, even though they're equally low-signal. And there's a lot of word-compression slang (e.g., "totes" for "totally", "prolly" for "probably") that increases the signal, so in theory I'd like it.
Thinking about it, a lot of the linguistic features that really bother me are exactly what the NORM pattern indicates: I don't like the ones from people with lower social standing. E.g., "ain't" as a class marker. I'm inclined to argue for the ones that privilege me (educated older white male), and against the ones that don't.
"A linguistic dissection of 7 annoying teenage sounds"
http://theweek.com/article/index/244460/a-linguistic-dissect...
http://www.nextmovie.com/blog/young-adult-clips/
And so is "old white dudes".
> When it comes to language, the rules of natural selection apply: Evolve or perish.
I demand strong affirmative action for the less privileged languages.