Audible Duck Face

New Slut Tell: Vocal Fry

Readership: All; Men;
Theme: Girl Game
Length: 1,200 words
Reading Time: 6 minutes

Intro

There are some terrible speech habits creeping into the vocal stylings of the young ladies in our culture. Their speaking skills have much to be improved.

Here, I’ll cover four bad speaking habits that are rife among women, especially younger women — Fillers, Uptalk, Downtalk, and Vocal Fry.

Maybe by calling attention to these poor habits, we can help eradicate them.

1. Fillers

Filler words are used to buffer choking and hesitancy in speech, but are also coopted to convey cultural awareness and to appear ‘cool’.

Fillers overlap with neologisms and slang, and are simultaneously the most fashionable and the most bird-brained speech habit of all.

The words used as fillers change with the times and seasons, and are often used to identify one’s self with a generation, an in-group, and/or a sub-culture.

Fillers have been around since time immemorial, but they became especially trendy in the 1960s as a way for young people (Boomers) to identify with their Sexually Liberated peers and to distance themselves from older conservatives.

For example, popular fillers in the 1960s were…

• Dig / Can you dig that?
• Far out (impressive or spectacular)
• Groovy (cool)
• Hip (trendy)
• Man

Fillers used in the 1970s included…

• Bud / Buddy
• Chill out (relax)
• Copacetic (boring)
• Down with that (agree)
• Freaky (strange or perverted)
• Psyche (crazy or joking around)
• Way to go

In the 1980s, there were words like…

• Awesome
• Bodacious (flamboyant)
• Bogus (fake)
• Cool (reprised from the 1950s)
• Doi! / Duh! (stupid)
• Gag (repulsive)
• Gnarly (complicated or messy)
• Grody (detestable or dirty)
• Gross (putrid or disgusting)
• Like…
• Most Excellent!
• No way! (impossible)
• Rad / Radical (cool)
• Totally
• Tubular (interesting)

The 1990s introduced fillers like…

• As if…
• Bling (attention grabbing)
• Chillax
• Dude!
• Not!
• Phat
• Righteous
• Schwing!
• Scrub (common or practical)
• Slammin’ (high impact)
• Sup / Wassup
• Whatever
• Word

In the 2000s, it was…

• Dafuq
• Dawg
• Epic (great)
• Fail
• Hawt
• LOL
• Mega (extremely)
• Owned (defeated or shamed)
• Sick (uniquely cool or radically different)
• Sketchy (deceitful or doubtful)

Throughout the 2010s, we had…

• Bae
• Basic
• Binge
• Dead@ss
• Extra
• Literally
• Salty (rude)
• Shade (offense)
• Shook (surprise)
• Simp (weak)
• Soy (wimpy)
• Stan (common)
• Very
• Yeet!

Lately, we hear words like these.

• Already
• And then…
• And um…
• And I was like…
• Bet (agreement)
• Cap (lies)
• Cringe (embarrassingly inept)
• K / Okay (dismissal)
• Salty (bitter)
• Slay (excellent)
• Sus (suspicious)
• Vibe (relax)
• Yeah! (incredulous)
• You know…

Looking back over the decades, we can see that over time, some of the typical fillers have become more bland and dumbed down with every decade (IMO), while others are more esoteric, sarcastic, and/or unintelligible to the uninitiated, with some entirely new words having their own meaning.

Fillers are useful for injecting emotion and can provoke listener’s interest — when used occasionally.  But when speakers are repeating the same words again and again at the beginning or end of every sentence… well, that’s just annoying, totally brain dead, and entirely unacceptable.

Sure, we all use these words every day, but when they’re used multiple times in every sentence, that’s just exasperating.  Personally, I believe the frequency of fillers is directly proportional to one’s desire for attention, and inversely proportional to one’s IQ.

2. Up Talk / Up Speak

Uptalk or Upspeak swept society in the mid-90s.

Uptalk is characterized by a rising intonation at the end of every sentence like everything is a question even when it’s not a question.

Uptalk is typically used to communicate a childlike openness and empathy, but it is also used in a mocking way to convey condescension.

Talking to someone who constantly uses Uptalk is like conversing with someone who is in eternal doubt.

It makes guys appear like they’re in a perpetual state of disbelief, or worse, utter stupidity.

It makes girls sound like an airhead or a bimbo.

Up Talking with Connie Chung 1994

Connie Chung described the Uptalk trend in her closing statement as, “A nation of questions with no answers.”

3. Downtalk

Sometime after Uptalk had been a thing for a while, and especially after Connie Chung’s report, people became more aware of the rising intonation, and it became blasé.  Then the pendulum swung the other direction to try to create a wary antidote, and intonation went down, i.e., Downtalk; but they went down too far and hung it out to dry.  Where a rising intonation was meant to sound cheerful, chipper, happy, and pleasantly curious, in contrast, lowering the voice at the end of every statement makes a speaker sound more authoritative, conclusive, and confident.  It is also calming, even numbing, and suppresses emotions.

Although these vocal styles were trending two decades ago, nevertheless, we continue to hear women habitually using Uptalk and Downtalk, rather than speaking emotively, fluidly, and melodiously.

4. Vocal Fry

Humans generally have three vocal registers: falsetto, modal, and fry.  Vocal Fry, AKA glottalization, utilizes the lowest register of the voice.  Vocal Fry sounds like you’re running out of air at the end of your sentence, so you just exhale harder to get your sentence out.  It has a guttural sound like a frog croaking or an old creaky door.

Vocal Fry is subconsciously intended to make one appear detached, intelligent, objective, smart, and sophisticated.  But the thing is, it doesn’t, because it is profoundly annoying and distracting. Excessive vocal fry’ makes one sound ambivalent, like you don’t give a crap about anything — an expression and a symptom of Nihilism.

To give readers a taste, here’s an example of whoreable Vocal Fry.

Vocal Fry started to appear among young women en masse in the early naughts, and is believed to be a pendulum response to the previous trends of Uptalk and Downtalk.

Awareness of Vocal Fry started to spread in 2010 with the publication of a study in The Journal of American Speech [1], which found that female college students in California tended to speak with much creakier voices than male students and Japanese students. The researchers noticed this was an irregular pattern, because a heavy use of Vocal Fry is a masculine vocal pattern. 

Vocal Fry among young women came to widespread attention again in 2014-2015, after it was covered by an NPR study [2].

Despite this wider awareness, women continue to croak in Vocal Fry like frogs in boiling water.

Conclusions

Above, I’ve described a few annoying modes of speech common to modern females.

1. Fillers buffer choking and also convey chalant coolness.
2. Uptalk expresses enthusiasm and openness.
3. Downtalk conveys detached authority.
4. Vocal Fry dampens emotional expression.

Uptalk and Vocal Fry are commonly heard among children, young teens, and people in upscale social groups, notably Zoe Deschanel, Lena Dunham, and Kim Kardashian.  Both Uptalk and Vocal Fry are vocalisms used as mode of communicating rapport and in-group affiliation.

But the thing is, once you notice these speech habits, you will never be able to NOT notice them, and then they are terribly annoying.

Good Lord, just STOP all the pretentious speech and talk normally!

Ideally, good vocal intonation conveys a slow, melodious voice, rhythmic speech, containing choice words and occasional pregnant pauses, and the expression of genuine emotions.

Lest we forget what good speech sounds like.

References

1. Yuasa, I. P. (2010). Creaky voice: A new feminine voice quality for young urban-oriented upwardly mobile American women?. American Speech, 85(3), 315-337. [Source]
2. NPR: From Upspeak To Vocal Fry: Are We ‘Policing’ Young Women’s Voices? (2015/7/23)

Sources

Here are a few videos I used to collect information. 

Warning to Readers: I didn’t embed these videos in the post because they’re super cringe.  To spare readers unnecessary suffering, I’ve picked out the meat to include in the post.

• Stuff Mom Never Told You: Why do girls have creaky voices? (2014/6/18)
• AllisonMacD: Vocal Fry : The Rules (2015/8/28)

Related

• Σ Frame: Play is the Essence of Game (2025/5/21)