Creaky Voice: Another Example of Young Women's Linguistic Ingenuity (opens in new tab)

Here's another article, and a good voice example:

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/12/vocal-fry-cree...

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/vocalfryshort.mp3

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?

My impressions exactly. Does anyone have another example? I think I'm missing the main point of the article because I don't get the example.

> I found her very annoying for several reasons

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.

I think they're talking about the way she sort of drags out words like "I di-id" or "It i-is". Unless I'm wrong.

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").

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.

But modern English does have significant French roots.

Like in Stoicism, nothing is inherently good or bad (non-descriptives) about things in and of themselves.

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.

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 usage sense is called a discourse particle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like#As_a_discourse_particle.2C...

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?)

Is that the reason it bothers you?

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.

Implied culture, style, and casualness are certainly signal, though not in the formal academic sense.

Don't disagree with you, but I imagine those people would have less problem with "isn't it?" vs "innit?"

Excuse me, who "warrants" the way you talk?