Remember uptalk, the practice of ending all your sentences in a question? Even the ones that aren’t questions? You do? You can take your fingers out of your ears now: uptalk is on the way out.
The less good news is that there is a new vocal fad. It has, at least if the violent responses it engenders among American radio listeners is anything to go by, the potential to be more rage-inducing than uptalk, the mid-Atlantic twang or even the, you know, Dort accent, roysh.
It is called vocal fry, or sometimes glottal fry or creaky voice. If you don't know what I'm talking about . . . believe me, you know what I'm talking about. Vocal fry is that crackling, husky, drawly, perpetually bored, just-out-of-bed quality that is most pronounced at the end of sentences. Think Kim Kardashian, Lena Dunham or Marge Simpson. Marian Finucane has a naturally creaky voice; Zooey Deschanel has vocal fry.
Wikipedia offers a technical explanation: it is “a special kind of phonation in which the arytenoid cartilages in the larynx are drawn together; as a result, the vocal folds are compressed rather tightly, becoming relatively slack and compact. They vibrate irregularly at 20-50 pulses per second.”
Like uptalk, vocal fry – which was once regarded as a speech disorder – first emerged as a phenomenon in California, but, on my last visit home to Ireland, I noticed quite a bit of creaking and frying there too.
A 2012 study published in the Journal of Voice found that two-thirds of a small group of 18-25-year-old American female college students use it regularly.
The study warned that it is a form of "vocal abuse". Another recent study, conducted at the University of Miami, cautioned that people would be reluctant to hire young women who use vocal fry, which made them sound "less attractive, less competent, less educated, less trustworthy, and ultimately less hirable", and suggested they change their voices.
Men do vocal fry too – think Bradley Cooper, Bill Clinton, Nicky Byrne and pretty much every pilot you've ever flown with – but, funnily enough, nobody's worrying about their job prospects or the health of their larynxes.
Instead of urging young women to change something as fundamental as the way they speak, shouldn’t we be slightly more concerned by the study’s finding that “sounding attractive” is considered an important attribute for potential employees? Why do we spend so much time getting wound up over the way women, young women in particular, sound?
I have spoken to radio producers who have been told by their superiors that "listeners prefer male voices". This is baseless nonsense – it has been comprehensively debunked by the Women on Air organisation, which is led by journalist Margaret E Ward – and yet it's still often invoked as an excuse for the still relatively low numbers of women on air. What does seem to be true is that radio listeners are more likely to complain, and more volubly, about quirks or tics in female voices. As a sometime contributor to Irish radio, I've experienced it myself: remarks about whether I sound sexy enough or too sexy, or complaints about my "too D4" accent.
NPR's radio programme This American Life recently featured an item on the sometimes violently abusive letters the station gets about the voices of its female staff. Many of the letters asked the same thing. "Why would NPR hire reporters with such poor diction? Is it because they don't have to pay young women as much?"
It is depressing that we live in a world where people are more inclined to get impassioned about the quality of a young woman’s speaking voice than their assumption that she may be paid less for doing the same job as a man.
I didn’t love uptalk and I am not a huge fan of vocal fry either, but that’s true regardless of whether it’s a man or a woman creaking in a sexy and yet slightly bored fashion at me. At nearly 40, this may just be a sign I’m past it.
Another study recorded a college-aged woman's voice while speaking in an even tone, and then again when employing the creak. When both samples were played for other students in Berkeley and Iowa universities, they described the creaky voice as "a prestigious characteristic of contemporary female speech" and, interestingly, "not yet a professional, but on her way there". So there, fellow fogies.
They’re milkin’ it
In the US, the land of endless consumer choice and an astonishing array of Frankenstein foods, you can have any kind of milk you want, as long as it’s not the kind that comes straight from a cow. You can get chocolate, fat-free, vitamin D, organic, strawberry, ultra-filtered, half-and-half and 2 per cent milk everywhere, but if you just want plain milk, you’re probably out of luck.
As of last week, you can even buy "premiumised" milk manufactured by Coca Cola. At $4.59 for a carton smaller than the regular half-gallon size, Coke's Fairlife milk is nearly twice the price of other milk, but the company says it contains half of the sugar, no lactose and twice as much protein.
Make mine a premiumised, ultra-filtered, vitamin D, 2 per cent fat, vanilla Milka-Cola Zero so.