Bathrobe sent me the YouTube clip Vocal Fry: what it is, who does it, and why people hate it! by Dr Geoff Lindsey, saying:
What is fascinating is the way he looks back and finds that creaky voice was once a prominent feature of posh male RP accents, with clips from various people including Sean Connery. So it was acceptable for posh male speakers of RP but is not acceptable for young female North Americans.
The clips are wonderful (there’s a whole segment of them showing that vocal fry, aka creaky voice, is ubiquitous in Finnish, to the point that speaking the language without it sounds unnatural), and I join Bathrobe in finding the video both interesting and enlightening. It’s 27 minutes long, but I promise you won’t be bored. And it definitely sticks the ending!
Not sure that Sean Connery ever spoke RP, exactly.
Mind you, RP speakers do glottalise half their vowels (a thing which is rarely remarked on, presumably because most of the people who witter about vocal fry etc actually can’t actually hear such things themselves anyway, what with it all being subphonemic, and are just flinging linguistic terms about in the effort to make their prejudices about how people talk sound coherent. Ish.)
Lindsey did note that Sean Connery was Scottish. However, Connery didn’t play James Bond with a Scottish accent. (That would have been interesting!)
Actually, it does show through at times (listen to how he says Pussy Galore’s name …)
Yes, Lindsey explicitly says that Sean Connery was taught his RP by a native speaker of it (and played a clip of him as well).
The whole point of RP is that it was an affected accent. No one spoke it as a native accent; it had to be drilled into people, usually at school, and the impression it was designed to give was one of superiority, arrogance, and a languid unconcern shading into a permanent state of utter boredom. It’s got the sneer built right in. It’s true that the right person – Churchill, say- was able to put over the confident superiority that PR was intended to convey. But many more just sounded like twits.
Lots of people hated RP. Kingsley Amis had great fun ridiculing it in the character of Bertrand Welch, the villain of Lucky Jim. And when you watch the Lindsey clip, don’t miss C.L. Lewis telling us in the full glory of his smug, self-satisfied pomposity that God loves us all. Without the fry, we wouldn’t hate his guts half as much, would we?
So it doesn’t surprise me at all that this annoying feature of RP – an accent that was literally designed to assert the speaker’s membership in the Superior Persons’ Club – turns up in the speech of affected, self-centered, smug, terminally bored young women in the US.
PS- nine years ago, on Language Log, Marc Liberman wrote a post excerpting at length an article from Jezebel by one Julienne Escobedo Shephard, which praised fry because it:
is a weapon of the young, disaffected woman … that specifically, they do not care about you. It is the speaking equivalent of “you ain’t shit,” an affectation of the perpetually unbothered…
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20797
Maybe you can’t hear it. But it’s there.
I found that a couple of weeks ago, and now I want his analysis of Danish stød. Maybe I’ll even ask him.
The whole point of RP is that it was an affected accent. No one spoke it as a native accent; it had to be drilled into people,
Many members of my own family (including those a generation younger than I am) currently speak RP as their L1. They are neither extinct nor in any way affected, and they learnt their dialect in just the same way as you did.
is a weapon of the young, disaffected woman … that specifically, they do not care about you
Also false.
@de, bloix
I think we may be talking about two things: RP is an accent native to certain families and possibly districts, and acquired by actors and formerly by BBC announcers . The Public school accent is a similar accent acquired in boarding school and imitated by social climbers. Harry Enfield has two characters: Cholmondley, for RP and Tim “Nice but Dumb” for Public school accent. What I call the Public School version is louder and more distinct, and speakers struggle in it to express emotional intelligence, should they have any. What I call RP can be at an audibility or enunciation level that causes serious comprehension problems in many hearers, who often do their best to say “Yes, yes” or “Exactly”, should the speaker require a response to anything, which is often not the case, as the speaker has often lost track of what she has said or is trying to say.
the speech of affected, self-centered, smug, terminally bored young women in the US.
This is sheer prejudice.
The concept of creaky voice as a feature of self-absorbed smugness and terminal boredom has great explanatory power. It accounts (for example) for the notorious smug superiority of the Vietnamese and the Kusaasi.
It is true that life can sometimes get boring in the savanna. I daresay that world-weariness may also be found in Vietnam. But that scarcely excuses them sounding so damn superior about it.
It’s also a feature of Danish male self-representation. Much is thusly explained.
It all fits, I tell you!
What about the vocal fry among the clinically depressed? I’ve always gotten the feeling that vocal fry among teenaged girls was a bid for pity and attention, a milder version of the phony suicide attempt.
Why does it need to be anything other than a way of talking that’s increased in popularity? I don’t understand the search for social/psychological associations.
I enjoy Geoff Lindsey’s videos and this one in particular became an instant favourite. A highlight for me was the lightbulb moment that the distinctive vocal quality that I recognized in Finnish and have been trying to imitate in my attempts to speak it was really the same thing as vocal fry in English.
I’ve always gotten the feeling that vocal fry among teenaged girls was a bid for pity and attention, a milder version of the phony suicide attempt.
I once heard a grad student (so late 20s) give a presentation. She gave the (rather technical) presentation mostly in vocal fry. She was someone who invariably presented as serious and confident. I was amused by the voice, because I’m easily amused, but it was a very good talk.
Last year or so I saw a YouTube video (which I will never be able to find again) by an astronomy grad student, presenting some recent remarkable work done in her group; she may have been the main author of the paper publishing those results. The entire thing was done in excellent vocal fry. She came off as excited and enthusiastic about her research. Nevertheless, one octogenarian commented about the video with outrage. He basically called her stupid, entirely because of her voice.
I don’t understand the search for social/psychological associations.
There almost always are, and I think there must be social associations to the vocal fry in the minds of its practitioners. It would be interesting to me to know what they themselves associate the vocal fry with, more so than what negative outside prejudices attach to it. Same with uptalk.
I think there must be social associations to the vocal fry in the minds of its practitioners.
Why? Why aren’t they just talking that way because that’s the way their friends talk? Do diphthongized vowels (say) also have social/psychological associations?
Ed.: I now think the first student I mentioned was using uptalk, not vocal fry. I hadn’t thought about that talk in a while.
And how would you analyze the social/psychological associations of the many particulars of your own speech? Somehow this only seems to come up when it’s aspects of the way young women talk that are under the spotlight.
Why? Why aren’t they just talking that way because that’s the way their friends talk? Do diphthongized vowels (say) also have social/psychological associations?
Because vocal fry signifies a different register. They can switch in and out of it, and do. Some more, some less, but not randomly.
Some people use one set of segmental phonemes for everything. For others, it can have a social association. You talk with your Southern or Minnesota accent to your family, and switch to another when you’re interviewing for a job.
And how would you analyze the social/psychological associations of the many particulars of your own speech?
Get a degree in sociolinguistics, I suppose…
People may and do have awareness of their own speech. I can say from my own experience, that I once went through a phase of using uptalk. I picked it up without much thought but I was aware of it, and I liked talking that way because of how it came off to me. I thought it conveyed politeness and modestness, the opposite of being a blowhard; not meekness or lack of confidence, as some may read it.
I must learn to use vocal fry myself. It is possible that it may not be enough to make me sound like James Bond, though. There may be nuances I’m missing.
The social association of vocal fry for Danish males speaking Danish is “I’m not gay”. I have no idea how it came to be that way, and no statistics, but avoiding fry is a large part of the outward signalling that homosexual males do. (Not as a conscious signal, I think, but the correlation is very strong). Funnily enough, as opposed to RP, I think that people who don’t know what vocal fry is might describe the avoidance as “affected.”
(My own normal speech patterns have so much fry that I used get a sore throat after an hour of trying to have a conversation over loud music. I can turn it off consciously, but then I’m told I sound gay. 45 years ago I wasn’t able to ignore that).
“The name is Bond, James Bond. No homo.”
…a weapon of the young, disaffected woman…
…vocal fry among teenaged girls was a bid…
…I think there must be social associations to the vocal fry in the minds of its practitioners…
[and so on]
so what, given the powers of telepathy that some of yous apparently have, are the intended messages and psychological roots of rhoticity? and are they as universal across rural vermonters, posh brits, and yinglish speakers in melbourne as you’ve told us those of vocal fry are among young women across a comparable range of social and geographical positions?
(also, i feel the need to point out that if anyone who thinks young women as a category can be reasonably described as “perpetually unbothered” is feeling lonely, the Flat Earth Society and the Birchers are always recruiting.)
The social association of vocal fry for Danish males speaking Danish is “I’m not gay”
This accounts for something which has always been a puzzle to Science: my relative lack of success in picking up Danish girls. All the time, I was unknowingly putting out confusing signals.
The mystery is now solved.
The Secret is James Bond impressions. Gets ’em every time.
[Unfortunately, the Kusaal for “I love you, I want you deeply” happens to contain no creaky-voice segments. But now I think of it, “The name’s Bond” does contain such a sequence. Yes, it all fits …]
Do Swedes and Norwegians (or Faroese and Icelanders speaking Danish, come to think of it) sound gay? Asking for a friend.
The most interesting young woman practising vocal fry in Australian media right now is Breanna Holden (linked successfully to 39 min 10 sec?). First, for the unreconstructed among us, I warn that we must resolutely set aside the visuals and focus on audible elements.
Bree typically does the sport segment on Saturday and Sunday for SBS hour-long news. (Excellent worldwide coverage; a pity about the commercial interruptions when it’s broadcast live, which give a reason for preferring Australian ABC offerings – all of which are ad-free.) She also sometimes does a thing called NITV News Update, where her vocal fry is spreading from a concentration at ends of sentences to the whole of most sentences.
Whatever we make of this phenomenon, I do wonder if such matters of presentation were treated in the course of study Bree went through (a Bachelor of Communications / Bachelor of Sports Media, Communication and Media Studies; see her LinkedIn page). Or in mentoring as a graduate’s career progresses. But mentoring by whom, on a matter that is elusive to all but delicate Hatters and professional linguists?
I’m all in favour of variety and autonomy for presenters on our publicly funded media, but let their presentational choices be informed choices: with knowledge of the full range of options available, and of how the results are likely to be received by many in their audience.
“I’m all in favour of variety and autonomy for presenters on our publicly funded media, but let their choices be informed choices”
As it happens, I can authoritatively state that Bree’s course did indeed touch on those questions, and that she did in fact make the choice to adjust some elements of her speech, but not her vocal fry. So can we therefore agree that henceforth listening to her will not be annoying?
So can we therefore agree that henceforth listening to her will not be annoying?
Ah, in that case we must fall into line.
The other Junior school teachers said good morning to Miss Brodie, these days, in a more than Edinburgh manner, that is to say it was gracious enough, and not one of them omitted to say good morning at all; but Sandy, who had turned eleven, perceived that the tone of “morning” in good morning made the word seem purposely to rhyme with “scorning,” so that these colleagues of Miss Brodie’s might just as well have said, “I scorn you,” instead of good morning. Miss Brodie’s reply was more anglicised in its accent than was its usual proud wont. “Good mawning,” she replied, in the corridors, flattening their scorn beneath the chariot wheels of her superiority
I’m like the other teachers, and get more Scottish and more rhotic when I’m disapproving, or being very precise about something; Jean Brodie is apparently one of Bloix’s deliberate RP speakers!
But wouldn’t the affectedly non-rhotic say “scawning” for “scorning,” thus preserving the rhyme?
Interesting to encounter quite bitter prejudice against RP from people who are outraged at prejudice against other ways of speaking. I’m not an RP speaker myself but have encountered many native RP speakers for whom it is nothing more or less than their native tongue. We need not look up to them or down on them on that account. In general, or course, the greatest prescriptivism and proscriptivism comes from those who purport to hate those things.
@Jen in Edinburgh: So the fascist was more RP? I can’t say I’m surprised.
@Graham: Of course, I kid. One obscure fact I like is that native-RP-speaking Edward VIII, although often derided for his supposed pro-German sympathies, actually did exactly what he was supposed to when he was contacted by German agents in Portugal, on his way to the Caribbean. He reported the contact and took instructions for what to do if he was contacted again, but nothing further came of it.
Alas, I can’t find video of my favorite example of vocal fry, the Captain Underpants scene in which the celebrated Jessica Gordon speaks to the lesser beings who travel with her in the manner of friends — Sophie One and Other Sophie. Note that Other Sophie isn’t even important enough to merit being called Sophie Two.
“I had no idea there were so many great bad-“har” videos out there. Sophie One, let’s go watch all of them. Other Sophie, go make us popcorn. Without touching it.”
In my daughters’ rendition, “them” gets a bit of crunch, but the final “it” can last 3 to 4 seconds.
There was almost a tragedy when a mom asked whether her daughter could practice with the soccer team of my youngest, which already had a Sophie. The new kid was also Sophie, and I had to insist my kid absolutely could not refer to the new girl as Other Sophie.
I actually think the prejudice is the same – that vocal fry is typically used by privileged folk to emphasize their privilege. I’m not saying that’s true. Just that the dislike of snotty Valley Girls and the dislike of snooty upper crust Britishers aren’t distinct phenomena. Nor is the fact that such dislike often carries over to people in the target group even though they may be humble and welcoming.
@trond 17.30
I think you probably need not ask whether you sound gay or not, you would have clear feedback (like Lars apparently) if you did. I once remarked to a female friend that I was surprised at the frequency men were “hitting on” me (did not upset me, just surprised me). Her response was along the lines of “you have a moustache and go out wearing a leather jacket, what do you expect?” It was a choice between the jacket and the ‘tash, so I kept the jacket and lost the moustache.
Best integration of a sponsor message I have yet seen.
I overinterpret facial expressions. To me, some people always look like they’re about to cry no matter their actual emotional state, while others have an inbuilt smile and look like they’re smiling even in their sleep.
Evidently there are people who overinterpret intonations instead.
Oh yes. Different ones in different places, just as with creaky voice.
Of cause.
I use a broader Australian accent when speaking with ordinary plebs and bogans and might slip in a few “grammar errors”. Gives me more street cred. If I’m speaking with an obviously cultured or educated person I tone it down a bit. Does that count?
Is this (https://captainunderpants.fandom.com/wiki/Other_Sophie) the Other Sophie?
That’s Other Sophie!
Def not “the Other Sophie”. Jessica has made Other Sophie her name.
I should note that the reason the line is so popular in our family is that during family movie night, I’m often sent to make popcorn. It’s almost like my wife is Parent One and I’m Other Parent.
“The name is Bond, James Bond. No homo.”
In the American Dad! episode “Introducing the Naughty Stewardesses” (2014), the character Jenna almost always uses exaggerated creaky voice when saying the name of her studly football player boyfriend Figgus (who has knocked her up, it turns out, but has to dump her because his coach won’t allow his players to have sex). Compilation of clips here. Somehow the creaky voice on the lengthened vowel seems to underline Figgus’ conventional masculinity and cool.
Do Swedes and Norwegians (or Faroese and Icelanders speaking Danish, come to think of it) sound gay?
I have heard several Finnish men claim that Swedish men are all effeminate homosexuals. Maybe lack of Swedish vocal fry plays into that prejudice.
Love Geoff Lindsey’s work.
On his you tube channel there is an interesting video about sound changes in Australian English.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7DuvWVazpk&pp=ygUYYXVzdHJhbGlhbiBnZW9mZiBsaW5kc2V5
And one of my favourites is this one about why certain phonetic symbols for English are incorrect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtnlGH055TA
I feel like maybe we lacked this broad international/comparative outlook in earlier generations. For all I know, the various features of the “Valley Girl” style of speech that were widely deemed emblematic of the supposed characteristic annoyingness of adolescent girls 40 years ago may have likewise duplicated features that were socially perceived as masculine/heteronormative in some foreign country.
Exactly, and the more one gets that international/comparative perspective the more one should be immune to, and annoyed by, the default assumption that people who talk like X are obviously showing Y annoying trait. People talk the way they talk, and it usually doesn’t reflect anything but the talk they’re exposed to in their daily lives.
I bet the non-Finland-Swedish pitch accent vs. the utter monotony of Finnish plays a role here, too.
…yes, but it mixes phonetic with phonological issues (in the tradition of John Wells).
Watch the video linked in the post; that’s what it is about, and there are many, many examples.
(That was a response to V, who deleted his comment.)
languagehat : thanks, I forgot my comment.
I think I commented that I don’t know what vocal fry is — John Barrowman?
I was interested in the link with low tone, in the light of the fact that there is no evident correlation between tone and vowel glottalisation in Kusaal.
The obvious explanation would of course be that I am just wrong in calling this “creaky voice” (and as I have often remarked, I am no Ladefoged.)
However, Lindsey’s example of preceding creaky voice as a realisation of English word-initial glottal stops suggests that the matter is not so simple (and historically, the origin of this in WOV is probably quite analogous.)
It seems that in fact “creaky voice” is not all the same thing:
https://idiom.ucsd.edu/~mgarellek/files/Keating_etal_2015_ICPhS.pdf
Turns out that there is quite a literature on creaky voice and tone, though it’s very skewed towards Asian languages (especially Mandarin), which historically seem to have shared rather similar processes of tonogenesis. As ever, not a lot on African languages in comparison. Even so, the matter is evidently not straightforward at all.
I suppose I should really have familiarised myself with these issues more before, though in my defence the only issue of any great import for the purposes of my Kusaal grammar was that the symbol ‘ used in the usual orthography definitely marks a vowel feature and not a consonant phonemically. All previous accounts are wrong.
Interestingly, the only non-WOV language having supposedly VC sequences in cognates of these words with glottal vowels in WOV is Nawdm, which has Vɦ (where ɦ is apparently [ʔ].)
Jacques Nicole, the linguist who has done much the most work on Nawdm, actually goes out of his way to say of ɦ that “L’occlusive glottale en nawdm apparaît dans tous les contextes consonantiques possibles” (in attempted rebuttal of Ines Fiedler); but as a matter of fact, it doesn’t, and it would be perfectly possible to analyse it as a vowel feature in Nawdm too, though I don’t know how far this would accord with the phonetics.
[I reckon these really were VC sequences in proto-Oti-Volta, but that really has no bearing on the issue as far as the modern languages are concerned.]
@Trond, I’ve never heard you speak is it? To a Dane, the Swedish and Norwegian palatalizations are intrinsically funny before vocal fry even enters into it, not to mention the chain shift where /u:/ ends up as [ʏʷ:]. (Not that Danes can hear the difference between [ʏʷ] and [ʏˠ.] = /y:/, but there are in fact lots of minimal pairs; Swedish is the poster child of the protruded/compressed distinction in rounded front vowels, but I’ve sort of assumed that the same thing happens in Norwegian, for values of. Come to think of it, rounded front vowels are most often compressed, cross-linguistically, so maybe you could posit their general protrusion in Swedish as the last element in the push chain. OTOH, Swedish also has untypical compressed back rounded vowels, so I think more epicycles are needed).
Returning to the topic, I can’t tell you how near-perfect an emulation of Danish phonetics would be needed before I, or much less your standard Danish female, would start to read deviations as social signalling, mainly because I don’t move in expat circles and the few males I remember talking to were pretty far from the norm in that respect.
“you have a moustache and go out wearing a leather jacket, what do you expect?”
I have a moustache and go out to smart events wearing a (rather posh) leather jacket. Never been ‘hit on’ AFAICT. My hairdresser (who’s camp as a marquee — his own description) with frequent vocal fry and extremes of tonal cadence says I’m depressingly hetero. I’m afraid he gives little insight as to what I’m doing right/wrong.
Wrong kind of mustache?
FWIW, to my ears Danish stød which is cognate to Swedish and Norwegian word tones, is not a full glottal stop but some sort of glottal gesture that generally results in creaky voice on the second mora. (Stød needs a syllable nucleus [stødbase] of V: or VR, synchronically. I remember someone saying that the cognate tones in the other languages need a “real” long vowel, or maybe a diphthong of which Danish doesn’t have a lot).
“So how do you combine creaky voice and vocal fry?” You don’t. Once sentence intonation brings me into the vocal fry range, stød turns in to a full glottal closure. This has not been verified instrumentally.
@David M
Maybe, but isn’t Lindsey’s point that there is a mischaracterisation of certain phonetic symbols? Diphthongs represented as monophthongs, and such like.
@AntC
You go to a hairdresser instead of a barber?!
That’s some mixed messaging right there.
😀
You go to a hairdresser instead of a barber?!
In NZ, we’re quite enlightened. The place I go is unisex. I don’t think the female clientele would go to a “barber”. And I like to think the cut for me is above what a ‘barber’ would aspire to. Is that already mixed messaging crypto-whatever? Clearly I’m an innocent in these matters (depressingly so, it seems).
>Exactly, and the more one gets that international/comparative perspective the more one should be immune to, and annoyed by, the default assumption that people who talk like X are obviously showing Y annoying trait. People talk the way they talk, and it usually doesn’t reflect anything but the talk they’re exposed to in their daily lives.
Well, if the focus of the sentence is on “annoying”, sure.
But aside from that, this seems wrong in basic conception. Accent, intonation, talking like X are exactly how humans show they belong to group Y, and groups, particularly those that are consciously joined or adhered to, do often correlate with traits. One question for me is how much of it is conscious and how much unconscious. It’s interesting that the thread so quickly moved to what I might call gay accents. I wonder if someone would comment on the degree to which they consciously adopted a gay accent. Some commenters seem to have consciously tried to move away from one.
I think of a good friend who I’ve known since before high school. He certainly used a gay voice long before he was open enough about it that a clueless and unfortunately homophobic person like my teen self would recognize it. (It’s funny to consider that I posed the question “why does he talk that way?” but never came up with the right answer.) But my sense would be, he also spoke that way before it was really possible for him to hang out with other gay men enough for the normal unconscious process of accent-accommodation to take place.
I have a rather weak, reedy voice. I was wondering last night while at soccer whether other men consciously try (tried when young and made it a habit?) to make their voice deeper and fuller. I can certainly do it, but I typically don’t.
It’s interesting that in past discussions, commenters have clustered vocal fry and uptalk. I feel these are opposite markers in English. Vocal fry being a sign of higher status, perhaps originally simply by association with RP. Uptalk, as an interrogatory marker used in a declamatory sentence, has always sounded to me like a sign of lower status, of uncertainty and a need for affirmation by the higher status listener. Certainly, that’s a context where I’ve often heard it. I do think it’s interesting that some of the same groups are pointed at for including both features in their vocal toolkit, but I think these things point to different aspects of identity, deployed differently in different settings.
When Jessica sneers at Other Sophie, vocal fry is a natural vocal tool to express dominance. Conversely, eager-to-please Michele in American Pie can’t help but use uptalk when cravenly hoping friends will listen to her story that happened “this one time? at band camp?” These tools can’t be used the other way round.
I was wondering last night while at soccer whether other men consciously try (tried when young and made it a habit?) to make their voice deeper and fuller. I can certainly do it, but I typically don’t.
To me such a deepening and engruffening had seemed to be a national tendency among Russians of a certain age, and some Israelis also; but that’s an old observation, not replicated lately.
When I used to attend philosophy seminars I noted deep-and-loud as a tendency among young American male academics. But again, that was years ago. One in particular sounded like a gridiron coach at full harangue. For an hour.
My own baritone voice shifts on a spectrum between engaging mellowness (I’m told by many, and believe) and noisome asperity (when there are fools to be suffered ungladly). I’m pleased with it for reading verse (I sometimes record renditions of Shakespeare sonnets, for the discipline and to achieve insights into the text that are to be had that way).
The Hattery needs a soundtrack! I’m curious about others, now.
Ryan, Lindsey points out that contradiction in perceptions of vocal fry and uptalk in the last 4 minutes or so of the video and says “Sexist haters, make up your mind!”
Well it’s just like me to arrive at the right answer slowly and clumsily when it was on display in more elegant garb if I’d only looked.
That’s one of his points; another is that the diphthongs are really /Vj/ and /Vw/ sequences, but for a long time he tries to convince his listeners that they’re [Vj] and [Vw] sequences in phonetic reality before he concedes that special syllable-final allophones of /j/ and /w/ are used – he points out the second /l/ in lilt, which I’d say is at least halfway through vocalization the way he says it. Using actual [j] would produce a very noticeable FYLOSC accent.
Anyway, it’s good to see that British understatement isn’t doing too bad these days: calling Jacob Rees-Mogg “fairly conservative” without batting an eyelash is an accomplishment.
Very, very much so in Japan – where the opposite also holds for women.
That may be another phenomenon: university teachers deciding not to use a microphone. The professor who taught me Mathematics for Chemists 1 was such a type; he droned on loud enough that he really didn’t need a microphone in a hall with at least 100 people. (Still, he was monotonous enough at 8 in the morning that I… didn’t fall asleep, because I don’t have the blood pressure to fall asleep sitting on that kind of bench. I rather fainted again and again, always woken up by my head falling forward.)
FWIW, to my ears Danish stød which is cognate to Swedish and Norwegian word tones, is not a full glottal stop but some sort of glottal gesture that generally results in creaky voice on the second mora
It would be interesting to hear what Kusaal vowel glottalisation sounds like to you. (You can hear audio clips online, including the whole New Testament, though that is unfortunately from a semidramatised version with lots of intrusive and inappropriate background music. A lot of the speakers are not very fluent readers of Kusaal, and speak in a very stilted way, but that makes some phonetic features easier to identify rather than harder.)
Actually, what would be really interesting would be if the Kusaal glottalised vowels didn’t all sound the same to you. They’re of two origins, historically: most are inherited from proto-WOV, but many come from not-much-earlier *Vɣ.
Prost, in his 1979 grammar of Toende Kusaal, still distinguishes them consistently, but Niggli never does and I’ve never come across anything like it in Agolle: da’ab “purchase” and sa’ab “porridge” are identical apart from the initial consonants, for example.
But I get a strong impression that neither Urs Niggli nor David Spratt (who laid the groundwork on Agolle Kusaal phonology) were much better than I am at hearing subtle phonetic differences: there may be speakers who still make a distinction.
@David Marjanović: Supposedly, the second-most-important reason for the lack of interest from foreigners (except for dedicated fetishists) in Japanese porn (pre-2005-ish) was that the women typically sounded like high-pitched, affected chipmunks. (The most important reason was obviously the blurring of genitals.)
I recall reading somewhere (via Language Log, I think) of a German-Japanese bilingual who was quite aware that she spoke in a higher pitch in Japanese than in German.
John Haiman’s grammar of Cambodian says
“Highly nasalised” makes you wonder if Americans sound girly to Cambodians …
https://youtu.be/P1-BXAzVyhQ
Fascinating Aida’s (see other thread) take on German female voices:
So, if you ever wonder what you have to do
To sound like a Hun
Just chain-smoke from the tender age of two
That’s how it’s done
And if the audience is all walking out
Just make believe that you’re a Kraut
And open your mouth and shout
In German
(Wasn’t a bench, but individual seats that would have sprung back up very, very loudly if I’d ever fallen off. But there wasn’t enough space to fall off anyway.)
DE, can you give a specific example in the recordings of the maybe-creaky vowels?
When I used to attend philosophy seminars I noted deep-and-loud as a tendency among young American male academics.
I’m no longer young, but I did that for 37 years of teaching. None of my classrooms ever had microphones. At any rate, to go on for an hour I had to find the most relaxed position of my larynx, which produced a voice deeper than my usual speaking voice.
can you give a specific example in the recordings of the maybe-creaky vowels?
This site has (annoying) audio of the 1996 Kusaal New Testament along with the text:
https://www.bible.com/bible/2209/JHN.1.KUS
The ‘ marks glottalisation. The main quirk of the orthography (apart from not marking length in diphthongs, except in one case where the marking is actually redundant) is that n between a vowel symbol and a consonant or before w y is a nasalisation marker and not a consonant; with a few exceptions, it’s only /n/ after a vowel word-finally (where nasalisation is written nn.) It’s always a nasalisation marker when it precedes the ‘ mark.
Most cases of ‘ are inherited from proto-WOV, and those of other origin have fallen together with those (most probably.) The main exceptions that you can identify from the orthography alone are ia’a and ian’a, which always derive from not-much-older *Vɣ; so does the vowel in po’a “woman” and its plural po’ab. Same in du’a(d) “bear/beget”, which turns up in this chapter.
I wrote:
When I used to attend philosophy seminars …
DM and Rodger C wrote:
That may be another phenomenon: university teachers deciding not to use a microphone.
I’m no longer young, but I did that for 37 years of teaching.
“Seminars”, I wrote; not declaiming to chasmic auditoria (been there, done that, hated it). Not talking about that different phenomenon. These were staff and postgrad student meetings in rooms accommodating 35 at a stretch. So I am moved to ask: Does the word seminar mean something different in different parts of the world?
I can’t hear most of the glottalization, FWTW, and sometimes here it where it isn’t written. Word-finally it does seem to involve an unreleased glottal stop.
But what threw me was the loud and clear [y] in dunia, twice. I really didn’t expect the Gospel of John to sound that much like Turks In Space.
Probably not; that math course was definitely a lecture, not a seminar. My idea is that people who give such lectures under such conditions for long enough probably tend to stay in their lecture voice.
My retired mother stays in her classroom voice – not higher or lower, just loud.
loud and clear [y] in dunia, twice
Yep. The 1996 orthography doesn’t distinguish /u/ from /ʊ/ (except that /ʊ/ is unsystematically written o in some words); /u/ is noticeably fronted after alveolars.
(For reasons that are entirely mysterious, the 2016 orthography, which does distinguish /u/ from /ʊ/, still doesn’t distinguish /i/ from /ɪ/, a distinction which is every bit as fundamental in the vowel system. And it’s made the notation for marking nasal vowels more ambiguous …)
sometimes hear it where it isn’t written
Words ending in short vowels before a pause have glottalisation on the final vowel, whether or not it’s part of the word intrinsically, except at the end of questions. (Arnott’s superb Fulfulde grammar says that this happens in Fulfulde too, so it may be more widespread in the region.)
Agolle Kusaal (but not Toende, or the related WOV languages that preserve glottalised vowels) has glottalisation of short vowels in some closed syllables before nasal consonants; at least, some speakers do, though my best informant actually didn’t. This is sometimes reflected in the orthography of the 1996 version, sometimes not; unlike in the 2016 version, the spelling of individual lexemes has not been homogenised throughout.
The 2016 orthography has also adopted the regrettable practice of writing final ‘ on full words of the shape CV whether or not the vowel is actually glottalised (they actually are glottalised when the words are spoken in isolation, but didn’t used to be written that way unless the vowel was intrinsically glottalised.) The version I linked to, happily, antedates this change.
Presumably it’s meant to distinguish eg ya “houses” from ya “you” (plural), but in practice Kusaal external sandhi rules make confusion very unlikely even in writing and even though the orthography never marks tone; thus (in 1996 orthography):
M gos ya. /m̩̀ gɔ́s jā/
“I’ve looked at houses.” (An unlikely sentence anyway: you’d be much more likely to say M gos yasieba “I’ve looked at some houses,”)
M gosi ya. /m̩̀ gɔ́sɪ̄ já/
“I’ve looked at you.”
Does the word seminar mean something different in different parts of the world?
It can mean something different even at the same university. I studied both Slavic languages / Historical linguistics and Economics in the late 80s / early 90s; seminars in the former were intimate affairs with at most 20 – 25 participants but sometimes as little as 3-4, with real discussions and conversations going on, while in Economics, where basic introductory lectures were attended by sometimes more than a thousand students, the seminars were still affairs with 100-200 participants, functioning like lectures except for the fact that every now and then the professor would ask questions and let students who raised their hands answer them.
My retired mother stays in her classroom voice – not higher or lower, just loud.
My father, a construction worker, would come home and still talk to us across a room as if we were fifteen or twenty yards away.
I have a mustache (and a leather jacket), and it’s possible that people (male or female) hit on me and I just don’t notice. But I also have a full beard as well as a mustache: does that count?
I think that the beard negates the moustache.
Sadly, I lack a leather jacket, so I am not really in a position to do the necessary fieldwork. It is also possible that my charisma has waned somewhat since I grew a beard in 1992, which may be a significant confounding factor.
Rodger C-
Your father was probably a bit deaf.
see, e.g., https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/noise/surveillance/construction.html#:~:text=Hearing%20Loss%20and%20Tinnitus,Construction%20workers%20have%20hearing%20difficulty.&text=About%207%25%20of%20all%20Construction%20workers%20have%20tinnitus.
Sadly, I lack a leather jacket, so I am not really in a position to do the necessary fieldwork.
Well, you must buy one and hit the streets. For science!
I wonder if a grant might be avsilable …
I think that the beard negates the moustache.
In Russian imperial army beards were prohibited for officers (maybe not the entire time, I am too lazy to look up the details), but allowed for soldiers. Many Jewish soldiers were complimented for their great beards, not negated in the slightest by their moustaches.
I was thinking more of the semiotics (as one does.)
Bloix: That makes sense. My father disdained all forms of protection, including a welding mask, and died largely of breathing metal fumes.
Man, I do not understand that form of masculine pride. (I don’t speak from a position of assumed superiority; I have to fight it myself.) “I don’t need no stinkin’ mask/doctor/therapy! I can handle it all unaided!” Where does it come from? Can we get rid of it? What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?
I once read that testosterone increases status-seeking behavior; what counts as such depends on the culture, and different cultures evidently draw the line between e.g. bravery and stupidity in quite different places.
The generation of chemistry teachers I mostly had made fun of the “mouth-pipetters” in the preceding generation.
I remember a science fiction story in which a macho astronaut landed on a planet of women who were first amused, then irritated by his chest-beating mannerisms. When he insisted on proving his valor against mortal peril, they injected him with a disease that had a 50-50 chance of killing him. Alas, I can remember neither the author (Joanna Russ? James Tiptree, Jr.?) nor the title nor where I read it, so my quest to retrieve it has so far been fruitless.
@languagehat: The place to ask about that would be the Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange site. If you don’t want to post the question yourself, I cant post it for you, but either way you should have a look to the answers here about what information you should include to maximize the chance of getting an answer.
I don’t feel like joining the site just to ask a question; if you want to try, my comment contains all the information I have except that the story is from no later than the 1980s (the 1970s are more likely, since I was still reading sf on a regular basis then). Oh, and the story was very short (a page or two) and definitely by a woman.
Where does it come from?
The Greeks went into battle with not much more defence than braiding their hair. It took the woosie Romans to adopt full-length shields and armour.
I remember my first student job sweeping floors around some vast thundering production line. I insisted on ear protectors, whereas the long-term inmates (who were all day standing in amongst the whirring) stuffed cotton wool in their ears and used some sort of primitive sign language — with which they continued in the break room.
Looking back, I’m appalled I didn’t wear a bike helmet as a kid: they weren’t required in UK at that time. In later years I’ve come off the bike several times, including once which reduced the helmet to smithereens.
If anything, male “bravery and stupidity” seems to be on the increase — amongst certain sub-cultures. Or is that a mis-impression arising from reactions to the pandemic? “Nanny State” blah blah. Me, I get every jag that’s MoH approved.
To me such a deepening and engruffening had seemed to be a national tendency among Russians of a certain age
Once a Japanese friend commented to me that the French would not be impressed by the Japanese folk singer Sada Masashi, who had a high-pitched singing voice. He maintained that the French have a preference for low-pitched masculine voices (although at one time it struck me that Michel Polnareff was an obvious exception). I don’t know about the Russians.
@AntC: Is there a joke there I’m not getting about the Greeks? Their extensive bronze panoplies go back to the Helladic.
Is there a joke there …
The “braiding their hair” was channeling Homer. So I had in mind Hoplite armour (illustrated top of page), which maybe included panoplies, but later than the Iliad times. (And panoplies were beyond the pocket of “The average farmer-peasant”, it sez.)
There’s a BMJ study of bike helmet laws that shows a negative effect on life expectancy. The small positive was outweighed by the number of people who gave up biking, and the effect on cardiovascular health.
And, it’s startling the number of people I’ve heard mention breaking a bike helmet. It suggests that either the helmet may have an impact on trajectory or balance or that it protrudes in a way a ducked head does not.
You’d do much better to advocate for bike infrastructure, since there is significant risk of bikers killed by vehicles, in mays a helmet does little to mitigate.
@Ryan, there have also been Danish studies to that effect, and consequently helmets are only compulsory for kids up to some age I don’t know. But we do have pretty good bike infrastructure.
I wear a helmet anyway, after a fall many years ago where my helmet split. Maybe my skull wouldn’t have hit the same way, but I took it as a lesson. My nephew refuses to wear one, citing as a reason that he is highly skilled at riding bikes. The argument that some lorry drivers don’t drive that well doesn’t seem to penetrate his skull.
On the other hand, there have been other studies that point out that life expectancy may not be the best metric — a certain proportion of (non-fatal) bike accidents have severe neurological consequences, more so if not using a helmet, and the loss of quality of life over time for survivors should be compared to that of the survivors of the “extra” heart attacks in people who stopped riding their bike.
@Ryan the helmet disintegrating is it doing its designed job, isn’t it?
Or are you suggesting behelmeted cyclists see themselves as invincible and go around recklessly headbutting/riding into things?
I have had some tangles with traffic. (And there’s pretty good biking infrastructure in my city.) But all my crashes were due to potholes or gravel roads.
Bike helmets often have a sticky-out part over the face, and conceivably that might cause helmets to disintegrate in a few situations where the wearer’s head wouldn’t. But on the other hand it may have protected the wearer from severe gravel rash of the face, and that’s worth a new helmet. (Remember that helmets stop being effective once they’ve had one severe knock. I don’t know if you should actually replace them after a simple drop to a hard surface, even when “empty”).
My nephew refuses to wear one, citing as a reason that he is highly skilled at riding bikes.
Another illustration of my comment from yesterday about macho pride/idiocy.
>Or are you suggesting behelmeted cyclists see themselves as invincible and go around recklessly headbutting/riding into things?
I’m suggesting helmets pretty clearly make impact in situations where the rider’s head would not. When most of us were growing up, we rode much more often and almost no one knew of anyone hitting their head. Now everyone has a story of someone breaking their helmet.
And that people who spend too much time on the dangers of cycling without a helmet are misguided and have a negative impact on the world. If you’re worried about other people’s cycling safety the biggest impact you can have is to drive less / stop driving.
Meanwhile, I do have two good friends who were in bike accidents. My best friend was hit by a bus in 8th grade. Broken leg and some sort of gastrointestinal injury but no head impact. The brother of a very good friend was wearing a helmet but died of massive bodily injury when he was hit and run over.
He recommended Beth Orton to me just before he died and I still think of hom when I lsten to her music.
This is the common story — drivers not ceding enough ground or overtaking and then making right turns in front of a bike. Body armor might help the victims of stray gunfire too. But that’s not the solution.
@Ryan, AntC: the so-called Peltzman Effect, usually discussed in the context of motor vehicles, is based on a claimed tendency for safety features making the likely consequences of a crash less severe to incentivize (perhaps subconsciously) more reckless driving. Or bike-riding. The strong form claims that this incentive is so strong as to completely offset the benefits, although that’s a more controversial assertion.
I don’t think it’s even in question that drivers are a bigger threat to bike riders than lack of helmets; what exactly are you arguing? Surely not that bike riders get what they deserve because they drive cockily with their superpower helmets.
It’s not a moralizing claim. The question is whether given the unpredictably hazardous environment in which bike riders may find themselves any particular “safety” feature has benefits that exceed its costs (including unintended side effects). Assuming that something has only benefits and no costs at all is unlikely to be accurate.
Consider (to return to motor vehicles) the notion of “defensive driving” that we were mostly instructed about in our youths. Do certain new safety features tend to lead to a sense of increased confidence that makes it more challenging to stay in the “defensive” mindset?
In Manhattan, bike riders do not get what they deserve because the ones who habitually endanger pedestrians by ignoring red lights, one-way-street signs etc etc are not handcuffed and hauled off to Rikers.
What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?
Dad: “That’s the sort of thing you read about in WOMEN’S magazines!”
There may be nothing funny about peace, love and/or understanding, but what is objectively funny is the sudden appearance of totem poles in the video (first around 1:30 and then a few times later on). As I understand it, the outdoor portions of the video were shot quickly and cheaply in Vancouver, B.C. where the band happened to be passing through on tour when the camera crew caught up with them. But totem poles are not so ubiquitous in Vancouver that you can’t keep them out of frame if they’re not part of the story you’re trying to tell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ssd3U_zicAI
I’m not sure how large a category it really is, but I’ve always thought of this as the prototypical “anti-anti-hippie” song.
(Picking a random active thread):
Technical issues: RSS feed has been off for the last couple of days. Now the recent comments and the rest of the epilogue to the webpage are missing.
I posted Hat’s story identification question here.
Thanks!
The trick they used was large shields that overlapped with their neighbours’, protecting the entire line as long as it stayed a line. Behind that, you don’t need armor (…other than a helmet and shin guards ideally).
*culture shock*
Statistical fluke? I don’t, and I can’t remember hearing of anybody who broke their helmet.
As AntC says, helmets are supposed to break upon impact. The damage to helmet represents energy that us not delivered to the head it is protecting. It’s the same reason modern cars have crumple zones;* damage to the equipment costs money but saves lives.
*On Saturday night, I saw the most rear crumpled car I had ever encountered. The whole back end had been squeezed and pushed up, but the back seat looked barely affected, although undoubtedly any passengers got a jolt. It was also evidently impossible to tow by normal means, presumably due to the extensive damage to the rear wheels, axle, and/or suspension. That meant it was still blocking the middle lane if traffic at the beginning of Route 277, even well after the other vehicle and all other debris from the collision had been cleared away.
biggest impact you can have is to drive less / stop driving.
Not going anywhere would have a larger impact, as was shown during the pandemic.
When most of us were growing up, we rode much more often and almost no one knew of anyone hitting their head
I grew up in the 70s, before bike helmets were a thing, and I knew several people among friends and family who hit their heads falling off or with bikes (including myself). Most just got up and walked away or rode on, but there were cases of concussion.
I hit my head really hard once at the age of 14 or 15, cycling too fast on the sidewalk of a main road and meeting another cyclist forehead to forehead after a failure of negotiation of right of way. This was the early eighties, well before helmets and when special cycle lanes were an exotic hippie idea from Copenhagen and Amsterdam. I have no doubt the impact would have broken a helmet (well, two). I also have no doubt that it put me at risk of a brain injury. But I (well, the two of us) just paused for a few seconds to clear the vision and got back in the saddle. It probably took weeks before I even told it at home
Years later, while at university, I once took a dive over the front of my bike at high speed downhill after (I conclude) hitting the front wheel against a tarmac edge and breaking enough spikes for the wheel to progressively lose its shape. A few uncontrolled wobbles, brakes that didn’t take, and boom. Still no helmet in the early nineties. I was sure I’d die, but (as I perfectly well understand in hindsight) with free way in front of me the hit wasn’t really that hard. The friction, on the other hand, was enough to get me to the E.R., where they also checked my head.
Most just got up and walked away or rode on, …
Well yes. Same as most times you’re wearing a seat belt and your car meets a solid object, you’ll brace enough to not ‘need’ the seatbelt to stop yourself. Never the less I’ve always worn a seatbelt — even where it’s not legally required.
Or is anyone going to suggest seatbelt wearers ipso facto drive more recklessly? Has anybody given up driving in protest/in disdain at the legal requirement?
@DM *culture shock*
Yes. That sounds like an excuse for somebody who didn’t want to ride a bike anyway. (There are macho cultures in which wearing a helmet on a _motorbike_ is disdained. ‘Easy Rider’ style.)
In 1993 I got to ride on the back seat of a Trabi. There was no seatbelt there. :-S
To be fair, on a motorbike it doesn’t make much difference. In hospitals, motorbike riders are called organ donors.
In the 1980s I inherited my Great Aunt’s 1963 Ford Fairlane. That car had no seatbelts in the front either and a steel dashboard that would presumably simply slice you in two upon impact. I eventually bought custom seatbelts for the front seat, luckily never put them to the test.
In the 1990s when I lived in Russia and Kazakhstan it was still considered unmanly to wear a seatbelt in any circumstances. Drivers and passengers would simply flop the belt over their chests when driving by a Gaishnik. I remember more than once getting in a Western car where the driver would insert the tongue into the buckle to turn off the alarm, but had naturally removed that component from the strap entirely. This was considered clever in some circles.
There are macho cultures in which wearing a helmet on a _motorbike_ is disdained. ‘Easy Rider’ style.
My native state of New Hampshire being one of them. But it’s not a macho culture, it’s a crazed libertarian culture. People take “Live Free or Die” a little too literally.
still considered unmanly to wear a seatbelt in any circumstances
Was it also considered unwomanly? How about un-pregnant-womanly?
Good question. In the era I’m talking about seatbelts really weren’t an option for women either since the seatbelts had been effectively uninstalled in many cars. There was a larger sense among the people that seat belts were useless and just an arbitrary government imposition to collect fines. And, having spent time in a 1990s Kazakh hospital, I can also understand the preference to simply die in a car crash immediately rather than being “cared for”.
The seatbelt law in the UK seriously reduced the opportunities for trainee eye surgeons to gain experience with severe eye injuries. This was very noticeable at the time.
Was it also considered unwomanly? How about un-pregnant-womanly?
What Vanya said, plus whenever someone (usually Western expats like me) actually tried to put the belt on, they (women included) would get an indignant “What, do you think I can’t drive?” from the driver.
@Vanya: we must have been in Kazakhstan at about the same time. I lived there (my first stay of several) from 1993-1997, in Almaty. Maybe we even crossed paths?
I had a friend in California, 1978-82–a weekend motorcyclist who worked in an ER–who always rode without a helmet, and who insisted that as a matter of observation, the chances of fracturing one’s skull when not wearing a helmet were smaller than the chances of breaking one’s neck while wearing one. I have no idea if this can be supported.
One historical irony is that the push for regulations mandating that all new cars have airbags installed (adding both cost and weight, with the latter predictably degrading efficiency including gas mileage) got underway in the late Seventies in the U.S., in large part driven by the fact that although by then it was mandatory for all new cars to have seatbelts, most folks didn’t use them and the idea (in the U.S., at the time) of a legal mandate to use them was not thought within the realm of political feasibility. Airbags would thus provide alternative protection that did not require the driver/passengers to do some affirmative thing to make them efficacious. If seatbelt usage had been closer to universal I’m not sure if the airbag idea would have ended up where it historically did because the anticipated incremental cost/benefit tradeoffs would have looked rather different.
I was FWIW in the minority of U.S. kids of my generation who were successfully taught by weirdo/deviant parents to be consistent and conscientious about seatbelt use even when the parents weren’t immediately present, which may well have saved my life (or at least avoided much more serious injury than a cut lip and swollen nose) in a crash that occurred when I was 16.
would get an indignant “What, do you think I can’t drive?” from the driver
“No, it’s the other fellow who can’t drive (and indeed may be out to get us)” is the response that comes to my mind.
“The idiots behind you are none of your business; only the ones in front of you are.”
– what my brother was told when he was learning to drive
Me: hitting the front wheel against a tarmac edge and breaking enough spikes
One or two errors?
1. I changed that from asphalt to tarmac, and now I regret, but I don’t really know why. Is there a meaningful difference?
2. Coming back here I notice spikes for spokes. I think that’s a hit&miss on my phone, but weird I didn’t notice while I was torn over asphalt and tarmac.
“No, it’s the other fellow who can’t drive (and indeed may be out to get us)”
This reminds me of a joke about a driver who ran all red lights and when asked why he is doing it answered “I am an excellent driver”. But then he stopped on green and when asked why, said that the guy on a cross road is also an excellent driver.
“No, it’s the other fellow who can’t drive (and indeed may be out to get us)” is the response that comes to my mind.
The clue to why that doesn’t work is in D.O.’s response (a joke I knew as one about taxi drivers) – of course, the driver is convinced that he can handle such situations. In my experience, it simply doesn’t make sense to argue with that – you get out of the car, you ignore the driver’s feelings and buckle up, or you decide that your personal relationship with the driver is more important to you than your safety.
“The idiots behind you are none of your business; only the ones in front of you are.”
The only traffic rule you need to know in Lebanon. It works surprisingly well.
There was a larger sense among the people that seat belts were useless and just an arbitrary government imposition to collect fines.
When I went to Niamey and got into a 4×4, I automatically put my seatbelt on. My host protested “Don’t do that, you’ll get your shirt dirty!” (Which was true; Niamey is a very dusty place, and, unless cleaned regularly, seatbelts there accumulate a layer of red dust which stands out rather sharply when transferred to clothing.)
your personal relationship with the driver
Or your dependence on that particular driver for transportation. In the age before Uber, my ex-high-school girlfriend was stranded at a party when the person who brought her (none other than Richard Stallman) decided to hare off after something or someone else. ignoring his promise to get her home (some 80 km / 50 miles away). She eventually found someone “personally unknown to her”, as they say, who would do her a favor. He drove like a maniac, but she survived. When I got to hear about it later, she wouldn’t tell me if he exacted a favor in return.
The only traffic rule you need to know in Lebanon
That may work if everyone is more or less equally armed. But the driver of a massive truck honk-honking in your rear view mirror may have made a rational decision that the consequences of to him of obliterating you, or at least threatening it[*], are not as bad as the consequences of missing his schedule.
Gale drove very well, but her nerve barely held up one night when there was one such truck directly behind us and another behind her and to our right, both driving well above the safe limit for the conditions, which were bad. This went on for who knows how long until she was able to drive off the road to the left — there was a large enough median strip — where she was able to wait until she calmed down enough and the traffic thinned for a bit. We switched to a secondary road that night.
Overall that was worse than the time she hit a patch of black ice, spun out of control off the road, and slammed into a snowbank. Fortunately, the drivers behind us were alert and no one was hurt, not even us. I have to say that these were the only two such incidents in 30+ years of driving with me on occasion; in the 20+ years before my time there was an incident that led to the discovery that those short poles in the roadway are rubber, and you can run over them if you have to.
My other significant other wasn’t so fortunate: she swerved to avoid a line of traffic cones (also rubber), collided with a very metal side wall, and wound up in the hospital with some broken vertebrae. The hospital either misread the X-ray or didn’t take one and sent her home, where a friend got her to another hospital, and she wound up with some money (sometimes it helps to be a lawyer; at the least, you know other lawyers) and a lifetime of back pain.
[*] “The threat of a move may be even more fiendish than the move itself.” —Assiac, chess columnist
(If you think I specialize in tough, independent women with runs of bad luck, you’d be right.)
That may work if everyone is more or less equally armed. But the driver of a massive truck honk-honking in your rear view mirror
Usually, the only reason why you as a car driver would have a massive truck behind you in Lebanon that you haven’t already outrun*) is that both of you are stuck in a traffic jam, in which situation you can’t do anything about the situation anyway. The truck driver will of course honk, but that’s because the car horn is the Lebanese national musical instrument. No threat is implied.
*) Except if you weren’t driving at maximum speed for some strange reason like obeying speed limits or consideration for pedestrians, which would be un-Lebanese and in disrespect of the only valid traffic rule – to take care of what’s ahead.
The trucks are numerous indeed on Austrian highways, but not that massive and not that fast. What they do to scare people is overtake each other – at almost no speed difference, so it takes forever and can cause traffic jams all by itself.
Honestly, one of the great pleasures of living in Austria after living in America is the experience of driving on a highway where the truckers behave themselves and don’t try to overtake passenger cars.
Reduced speed limits for trucks have largely eliminated that issue at least in Illinois. They don’t go above 70 for fear of getting pulled over, a big deal if you drive for a living. That serves as a de facto lower limit for all traffic.
The environmentalist in me prefers not to go too fast, so I tend to travel at truck speed.
What DM & Vanya say about Austria also applies to Germany. On long stretches of highways trucks are forbidden to overtake each other, precisely in order to avoid Elefantenrennen “elephant races” that hold up the rest of traffic.
Hat’s story identification problem has produced this suggestion: “When It Changed” by Joanna Russ, first published in Again, Dangerous Visions—not an exact match, but certainly a possibility.
No, that’s an obvious story to think of, and I turned it up myself, but while equally feminist it’s definitely not the one I had in mind.
As Buzz says, “if it had been one of those two, he probably would have located the story himself.” But thanks for posting it; I guess I’m doomed to ignorance!
As I [Buzz] said, I didn’t really think so, but I figured I ought to share the progress. (And sometimes people, even very knowledgeable people on the Science Fiction & Fantasy site, are certain that a certain work is not the one they are looking for—until it turns out that it actually is that work.)
I’m sure that’s true, and I suppose if I get desperate I may adopt that position, but I’m quite sure it ended with the injection of a disease with a 50% survival rate.
More on pitch, register and sociolinguistics in America: The Fundie Baby Voice.
Before clicking through, I guessed that it probably meant “that really annoying way of talking that young people with their own personal trust funds have.” (Or possibly “the speech of irritating and implausibly young fund managers.”)
I dare say that this is just as solidly evidenced.
I mean, she’s talking from her own experience, and it seems plausible; do you have reason to doubt it?
Well, young people with trust funds all sound pretty weird too. (In my series …)
This seems to be going beyond things like vocal fry into the territory of “these women talk too softly”, which may well be true, but is more on a level with “Texans are just so loud!”
DM, thanks for the link (and Kattie Britt should thank you too, no way I would have otherwise listened to her). There is nothing especially interesting about pitch or register AFAIK, maybe cadence. “Incongruous facial expression” is mainly because she was very censorious toward Biden and had to describe how hard life is in America, but after each dark utterance returned her mouse to a smiling expression. Whether she did it out of life long habit or because someone told her to smile and not look like a mean woman, I cannot tell (well, maybe I can, but it will require me to go hunt down her other recorded speeches, and I am not doing it, thankyouverymuch, bless your heart, whatever).
This reminds me of a purported comment from a suspiciously generic “African” regarding American missionaries: “The women all talk like men and the men all talk like women.”
I remember this because it actually does ring true. A bit, anyway. One must conclude that US Fundamentalists, in addition to their other heretical practices (like Trumpolatry) are abandoning their commitment to overseas missionary work … (I suppose there’s no money in it.)
(An alternative hypothesis is that all the Fundy women who don’t feel any need to act all submissive-like have left the USA and are now doing Good Works in Africa, so what you have left in the US is now the dross. That would actually explain a lot.)
That refers to the fact that she overperformed a facial expression before each sentence or so; while she was actually speaking, she overperformed emotions with her voice alone, her face had returned to normal.
so what you have left in the US is now the dross.
The Left Behind?
Indeed. Indeed.
One must conclude that US Fundamentalists, in addition to their other heretical practices (like Trumpolatry) are abandoning their commitment to overseas missionary work … (I suppose there’s no money in it.)
(An alternative hypothesis is that all the Fundy women who don’t feel any need to act all submissive-like have left the USA and are now doing Good Works in Africa, so what you have left in the US is now the dross. That would actually explain a lot.)
In the early 1990s, I happened to leaf through a book by – I think her name was Mary Proud, or something equally implausible – all about how a proper American Fundamentalist woman ought to live. Among many other similarly remarkable views, she reserved a good page or two of stinging denunciation for those do-gooders who went off on missions to Africa. In her view, they wasted good works on unappreciative foreigners who were hardly even converting, while leaving benighted American city dwellers to become heathens in what used to be a Christian country. Regrettably I don’t recall her mentioning anything about appropriate vocal demeanor, but it seems compatible with the selection process you’re hypothesising.
In all seriousness, US Protestant Evangelicals seem to have become remarkably self-obsessed. (This is of course entirely of a piece with their favourite fantasy of being oppressed and surrounded by enemies.)
In contrast, I remember a (Scots) missionary who told me that when he became a Christian his grasp of world geography improved greatly.
I’ve met and indeed worked with quite a few American missionaries in situ. I was often taken aback by their insularity*, but generally highly impressed by their commitment (and sometimes by their physical courage.) Also by their sheer niceness compared with grumpy Scots amd Germans.
I don’t recall even one of the women who could remotely be described as “submissive.”
* I encountered some striking exceptions to this sweeping overgeneralisation, I must say. However, it was depressing to see how often all the fiction books they had at home were either Lord of the Rings or Frank Bloody Peretti. (Don’t ask.)
You know, looking back on my previous comment it sounds awfully like I must have been reading a rather mean parody. It wasn’t: Mary Pride turns out to be a real person, and apparently a doyenne of the Quiverful movement as well as a self-appointed advisor on homeschooling (the latter being how I came across her book).
“Niceness” matches my much more limited observations of American missionaries as well. I don’t know of any other culture on Earth that idealises niceness as such half as much as the US (OK, maybe Canada or something).
Now compare the description from the woman who knew everything about Katie Britt by hearing her voice, how she uses it to stay in good graces with the men who “really hold power”, with Katie Britt, renegade president of the Bama student body, insisting that her African American guy friend be chief of staff, and then try to convince yourself that that other woman isn’t just peddling stereotypes we love to hear about our political enemies.
I don’t like Britt’s politics, but I’d rather understand who she is than patronize her.
The claim is that Britt is acting – that she’s performing for a specific audience, that “fundie baby voice” is something she consciously puts on for selected occasions as a cultural signifier.
Here’s a video contrasting Britt’s usual voice with her SOTU response.
Selected comments:
“It didn’t really even come off as fundie baby voice. She was too “assertive” at times for that. It was just clumsy narration with frequent shifts in her fake emotions.”
“That’s what was weird. Katie Britt served us all Fundie Baby Voice, White Woman Tears Voice, Furious Mom Voice, Giddy Laughing Voice, OnlyFans XXX Voice, Reverently Pure Church Woman Voice, and mashups like LaughCrying Church Mom Gets Caught On OnlyFans voice — all with the speed of a Vegas roulette wheel.”
That is not the claim the Jess Piper article makes.
…True, but that’s a bit hidden:
There it is. It’s arguably contradicted two sentences later, though:
That sentence claims she’s parroting a party line, and what she actually believes is beside the point.
The article quite literally says I know everything about Britt, she’s a typical preacher’s daughter and goes on to list all the things the author knows about Britt bc of that.
Your interpretation of Britt isn’t wrong. It’s just not what Piper says.
I wonder if you skipped the first large-font subhead graph as being a copy editor’s summary. It’s not. It’s in first person.
My mother and my wife are both preacher’s daughters. Let’s just say that they do not conform to Jess Piper’s preconceptions. At all. I presume that this must reflect some kind of theological deviance. If they’re still under guarantee, perhaps I can return them and get replacements.
Are they American? If not, I’m afraid they’re not under warranty.
Younger Son is marrying a preacher’s daughter too. (Taint in the blood, I suppose.) She doesn’t seem very submissive either. I should probably forbid the match.
My wife spent some time in Chicago as a child. Is that enough to activate the warranty?
The longest warranty period I have heard of is ten years (steam engine produced by Krupp in the 19th century – is that a product category that’s applicable to your wife, anyway?) I can only guess at how long you are married, but I suspect you may be out of luck….
is that a product category that’s applicable to your wife, anyway?
Well, I suppose that you could argue for a family resemblance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance
30 years on from the book Lameen recalls, there are many parts of Africa with higher average Sunday church attendance than many parts of the U.S. and even more parts of Europe. So it does rather seem as if the old-timey style of missions-to-the-benighted-heathen folks should declare victory as regards Africa and refocus their attentions closer to home. If the well-populated-but-underresourced African churches find themselves still short of folks with specific technical skillsets (like eye surgery), exceptions can be made.
I get the impression that this has actually largely happened, in fact, though my own experience is coloured by that fact that I worked for the Christoffelblindenmission, which, though certainly a medical missionary organisation (the clue’s in the name), is not at all the sort of thing that comes to mind for most people when talking about missionaries.
In Nigeria, I was seconded to ECWA, which is the “indigenised” incarnation of the old (splendidly-named) “Sudan Interior Mission”, which very much was the sort of thing that comes to mind when you say “missionary.” They have plenty of home-grown preachers and evangelists of their own now, and are only interested in foreign specialists with particular technical skills (like mine.) In Nigeria, as in many African countries, it’s in any case pretty much impossible to get a work visa anyway, unless you can demonstrate that you bring something like that. (And quite right, too.)
The assistant pastor of my local church here in Wales (now gone on to his own church in Glasgow) was a missionary from Zimbabwe (of Shona origin.)
As one of the lesser-known Christian saints was wont to say,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs
A couple of years ago, I met an Indian Catholic priest who was on his way to a parish in Bavaria he was about to take over. A few years later I saw his photograph in a Spiegel article on how the Catholic church in Germany has to import priests from abroad to fill rectorates due to a lack of local candidates. Despite Bavaria having the reputation of being arch-catholic.
I just learned today that Bavarians “won’t stand for wind turbines being put up near their homes.”
That would be because of the notorious association between wind turbines and Protestantism.
Markus Söder, the Bavarian Minister-President, is known for his populist NIMBYism. He not only opposes wind turbines near settlements, but also managed to criticize the Federal government for phasing out nuclear power while at the same time vehemently opposing even investigating the possibility to build nuclear waste storage facilities in Bavaria.
Austria imports a lot of priests from Poland and Nigeria; and the countryside is studded with wind turbines.
…and I’d much rather have a nuclear-waste storage site in clay, as in the proposed site in Bavaria, than in salt, as in the active supposedly-not-permanent site in Lower Saxony.
I do have a very bad memory for subheads, but what it literally says is:
Preachers’ daughters are not mentioned, and the whole thing is so short it barely contains any information. The rest of the text does heavily imply that fundie baby voice is something “well-practiced” that most of its users switch on and off as needed for different audiences; that’s what I remembered.
That’s explicitly stated in the subhead.
BTW, I’m a great-grandson of an Orthodox priest. Unsurprisingly, there aren’t any Catholic priests among my documented ancestors, but a priest’s housekeeper is, and what little seems to be known of the circumstances is said to be slightly suspicious.
Ongoing since 1975[citation needed].
The Left Behind?
Behind, maybe; Left, certainly not.
In her view, they wasted good works on unappreciative foreigners who were hardly even converting, while leaving benighted American city dwellers to become heathens in what used to be a Christian country.
Charles Dickens, though no fundamentalist, would probably have agreed with the sentiment.
but generally highly impressed by their commitment (and sometimes by their physical courage)
Ex-football-players, perhaps? (I sometimes think of 17C gun infantry, who though they could not aim their weapons, were very good at walking toward the enemy, reloading and pulling the trigger until actually dead.
Quiverful
That’s -full, as in how many children you are supposed to have (twenty?)
The longest warranty period I have heard of is ten years
Until 2018, the U.S. retail company L.L Bean would accept merchandise returns at any time and in whatever condition, even without a sales receipt, which was in effect a lifetime warranty. Eventually, enough people (including my other significant other, alas) would simply buy clothes and send them back whenever they were tired of them, or buy them second hand and “return” them for new stuff, that they had to stop the drain.