Johnny Depp
Bruce Willis
Leonardo DiCaprio
Vin Diesel
Vin Diesel (Groot)
Vin Diesel (Iron Giant)
Tom Hardy
Howard Stern (While complaining about vocal fry)
The man asking his dog to say “I love you” but not the dog saying “I love you”
Snoopy
Donald Duck
This male lion
These male hippos
Mars
Tags: male vocal fry, oh i forgot for them it’s called gravitas, vin diesel, vin diesel can get it, vocal fry
Seems like the vin diesel can get it tag would have more articles. Like hundreds.
I mean, it’s never not true, so it seems like one could apply it pretty liberally, right?
“link roundup, the internet, vin diesel can get it”
Pages would fill.
It would be Toast Diesel.
Butter Diesel.
Hmmm ….
*mind wanders*
Man, I love vocal fry. Any gender. I could listen to Marc Evan Jackson forever and it’s because his voice is like 70% vocal fry.
A guy of my acquaintance is very, very smart AND has a major case of vocal fry. I melt every single time I hear his voice. EVERY SINGLE TIME. It is a secret love affair, the one I have with his voice.
Fortunately for me we’re mostly limited to phone conversations so he can’t see the puddle on the floor.
Now imagining you work with Peter Serafinowicz’s character in Black Books.
LOLOL
Swooning at the thought!
Marc Evan Jackson! I love that episode of Thrilling Adventure Hour where everyone is impersonating him/Sparks Nevada, and basically, they’re just doing a lot of laconic vocal fry.
YES, and then you see him in that adorable bow tie & it’s just like GET IT
Me to my cousin the other day: I just… Mark Evan Jackson… his voice is SO HANDSOME.
I didn’t know voices could be handsome, but there you are.
Love him on Brooklyn Nine Nine. Perfect husband for Holt.
+1 forever. Also maybe some cartoon bullfrog?
+1 for the “oh i forgot for them it’s called gravitas” tag
+ a billion
If only Howard Stern could always come with an adorable dog chaser.
Bless you.
You know, now that I think of it, my little brother’s voice is basically all vocal fry. I think it started around age 14 or 15, when he would try to sound more manly while talking to his friends or answering the phone, and over the years it sort of morphed into his real voice.
That is totally how it happens!
But no actual Phillip J Fry?
Alaska from RuPaul’s Drag Race is one for the vocal fry.
Also, i totally relate to that dog’s first reaction to the dude saying I love you over and over. (A yawn)
Thank you so much, Howard Stern is an alive piece of bullshit.
*Inarticulate thoughts about criticisms of young women and girls and their choices of clothing/music/language/fashion/footwear/sexual expression/haircuts/makeup/careers/ad infinitum, juxtaposed with role of this demographic as innovators and change-makers especially with regard to linguistics, everyone says “like” nowadays and no one has died from it, probably it’s all about needing women to stay insecure and self-doubting in order to sell them tons of crap and keep them from doing well in math classes, not that there’s a conspiracy, but is there a conspiracy???*
You mean this?
Lakoff argues that the very things career coaches advise women to cut out of their speech are actually signs of highly evolved communication. When we use words like so, I guess, like, actually, and I mean, we are sending signals to the listener to help them figure out what’s new, what’s important, or what’s funny. We’re connecting with them. “Rather than being weakeners or signs of fuzziness of mind, as is often said, they create cohesion and coherence between what speaker and hearer together need to accomplish — understanding and sharing,” Lakoff says. “This is the major job of an articulate social species. . .”
Language is not always about making an argument or conveying information in the cleanest, simplest way possible. It’s often about building relationships.
YES! This is what I’ve wanted to yell every time this shit comes up.
And, of course,
Indeed, as with salary negotiations in which women are damned if they don’t ask for a raise and penalized for being overly aggressive if they do, tweaking speech to be more direct and less deferential comes with its own consequences. “When women talk in ways that are common among women, and are seen as ineffective or underestimated, they’re told it’s their fault for talking that way,” the linguist Deborah Tannen, who’s written several best-selling books about gender and language, told me. “But if they talk in ways that are associated with authority, and are seen as too aggressive, then that, too, is their fault when people react negatively.” Asking women to modify their speech is just another way we are asked to internalize and compensate for sexist bias in the world. We can’t win by eliminating just from our emails and like from our conversations.
Yes, completely. It’s both satisfying and somewhat embarrassing when someone clearly articulates your half-formed thoughts.
poor thing
I just can’t take Mars seriously in the workplace.
One year going as Dean Winchester for Halloween * I found the best way to approximate his voice is to push so much fry into your voice that it’s physically painful.
*the highlight of the outfit was my Mystery Spot t-shirt.
In college, I made a t-shirt with the pig breakfast sign from Mystery Spot, but replaced “pig-in-a-poke” with “Kill Dean.” I probably still have that shirt somewhere.
This is genuinely the real reason I stopped watching Supernatural. Sure, the misogyny doesn’t help, but really it’s just that I spend the whole time thinking “The hell is up with their voices?”
IDK, it’s probably related. Their deep voices of manly deep manly deepness for proper expression of manly deep manpain.
Watch out, Euro-person spouting prejudices. When I was much younger, and confronted with vocal fry for the first time, I remember saying: “Why do Americans talk like they’re puking?”. Years later I heard about vocal fry for the first time, but I was very surprised to hear it only referred to in relation to women.
Curious linguist question. Are there any other languages out there where vocal fry has crept in as well?
p.s. My own native language has its own batch of horrors, so this is not a claim to superiority.
I hear a ton of people speaking French all the time with tons of vocal fry. Worse than English, for some of them.
It’s not something that “creeps in” or an item in a “batch of horrors,” it’s a normal vocal register. Americans might use it more than others, but people can descend into the vocal fry register in any language, and it’s especially easy to do (and common) at the end of utterances when your pitch is falling anyway. I just checked, and it was not hard for me to find examples of it in Russian YouTube videos. I’d be more surprised if there were a spoken language where it never happened, although perhaps it might be uncommon in tonal languages, where changes in pitch encode meaning.
I know that people with different accents tend to “hang out” in different parts of their natural registers when speaking (e.g. British English speakers tend to stay in the mid-to-upper part of their registers, while American English speakers tend to stay in the lower parts), so while vocal fry probably does occur in every language everywhere, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s more common in some areas than others. That is the extent of my knowledge of accents, however.
I took a somewhat advanced French course in college where the professor spent a lot of time trying to get us to “sound good” as we spoke, like teaching us to imitate French intonational patterns and giving us tricks for how to pause or stutter or correct mistakes during speech the “French” way, and he spent a whole day speaking in vocal fry and pursing his lips (and telling us to do it too) because it’s apparently so common in casual speech among French speakers.
ETA: also apparently it can indicate the speaker’s contempt for a topic which is just perfect and I keep that in mind whenever I hear dudebros complaining about women using it on them in English
Among linguists it’s also called “creaky voice” and it’s not only possible in all languages, there are actually some languages where it serves a function (other than paralinguistic functions such as to help identify the end of utterances, the finality of a speaker’s statement, or, paradoxically, the uncertainty of a speaker’s statement or the imminent continuation of the utterance – all functions which it serves in English). Danish, for instance, has words which cannot be pronounced properly in “modal voice” (the normal, non-creaky way of speaking), and some Native American languages also use it, according to Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creaky_voice
There’s another register called “breathy voice,” which is the opposite in terms of how your vocal cords are moving, and occurs less often in English but gets a lot of play in languages with breathy consonants like Hindi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathy_voice
I used to work with this woman who could be kind of a know-it-all jerk. She had previously worked for NPR for a long time, and loved to make a big deal about all the NPR people she knew. So one day she was complaining loudly about young women’s vocal fry and how she totally couldn’t stand to listen to it, how stupid we sound, how we’re destroying our vocal cords, etc. I couldn’t resist piping up, “What about Ira Glass?” (She fucking loved Ira Glass.) She got super huffy and said, “Well… for Ira it’s part of his ART.” Lol.
UGHHHHHHH
Ira Glass reacting to complaints about female reporters’ vocal fry: “Have you noticed that I do it too?” and “[Stanford linguist Peggy Eckert] says the same thing happened with upspeak and with the word like. Reporters would call her about these things. They’d point to them as a problem with young women when young men do all that also.”
Aww, Ira. You’re a good egg.
Ira Glass’s voice is the epitome of ‘vocal fry’. The gaggle of young women at NPR getting taken to task for this alleged problem probably subconsciously modelled their speech patterns after Glass himself.
I’m completely focused on figuring out what Tom Hardy is eating, but I can’t bring myself to watch that video all the way through.
I hate vocal fry. HATE IT. Hate it in men, hate it in women, hated it before I had any idea that it was a thing with a name, as opposed to just ‘that weird, lazy, swallowed way of talking’. I have tried so hard to let it go because of the way it’s used as a weird misogynist football, but I can’t. It makes my spine twist and my skin crawl, and I find myself inadvertently clearing my throat or chugging water, as if that’s going to clear the other person’s speech. I don’t care if it means I’m an old crank, damn it. It’s AWFUL. (And get off my lawn.)
No, it’s manly huskiness (except for the husky, in which case it’s husky manfulness).
1997 leonardo dicaprio
👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀 good shit go౦ԁ sHit👌 thats ✔ some good👌👌shit right👌👌th 👌 ere👌👌👌 right✔there ✔✔if i do ƽaү so my selｆ 💯 i say so 💯 thats what im talking about right there right there (chorus: ʳᶦᵍʰᵗ ᵗʰᵉʳᵉ) mMMMMᎷМ💯 👌👌 👌НO0ОଠＯOOＯOОଠଠOoooᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒ👌 👌👌 👌 💯 👌 👀 👀 👀 👌👌Good shit
also what kind of monster posts the end of iron giant
Me. I’m the monster.
seriously, i am glad that i could only kinda glance at this while still at work and got to react not at a place that is my apartment and not my desk with all the people around it
Suuuuuper Man :'(
[appears in a puff of multicolored smoke]
SUCK IT, HATERS, MY VOCAL FRY IS A BEAUTIFUL AND USEFUL PART OF MY VOCAL TOOLBOX
AND IF YOU DON’T APPRECIATE IT
MAYBE IT IS YOU WHO IS A TOOLBOX
[full vocal fry] just somethin’ to think about
[vanishes, leaving only the scent of smoke and the memory of her vocal fry hanging in the air]
this comment for president
wait ’til i give my state of the union address
glottal scrape evvvvvvvv’rywhere
I don’t hear it. Like, TAL did a whole *thing* about it, and the whole time I had no idea what they were talking about. They played examples and as far asI can tell those people were just… talking? I read articles and comments where people are strongly FOR or AGAINST fry and I just don’t even know what I am supposed to be hearing. Do I do it? Am I doing it right now?
I have yet to figure out what vocal fry IS! Like you, whatever it is people are talking about, I don’t hear it.
What does drive me crazy is people speaking through ill-fitting dentures. John McCain, Paul Martin. But I’ve never heard anyone complain about them.
As far as I can tell, it’s basically Stacey from Daria.
The easiest way to explain it is that you slow your voice down until it goes creaky. “Normal” voice is heard as one continuous stream of sound, but with vocal fry it comes out in sort of really fast clicks. My brother and I used to slow our voices down really far into the vocal fry zone on purpose, so that we could amuse ourselves by making popcorn noises in the backs of our throats.
(And the reason it sounds like people just talking is because it totally is just a very common feature of regular speech.)
my brother and i used to do that too, but we used it to talk to each other as “demons” and/or “aliens”
…
brb, calling my brother to leave a distorted voicemail!
Yes! Jeez. I haven’t felt this frustrated since the last time I tried to do a Magic Eye puzzle circa 1994. People just sound a little…scratchy maybe? I don’t know. Scratchy voices remind me of Marlene Dietrich and how is that bad again.
I like Ira Glass’s take though: “Glass talked to linguist Penny Eckert, who did a study asking people to rate how authoritative a radio reporter with vocal fry sounded. The response depended on the age of the rater. Those under 40 thought it sounded authoritative while those over 40 did not. Basically, as summed up by Glass, “if people are having a problem with these reporters on the radio, what it means is they’re old.””
I’ve listened to that part so many times, and I just don’t hear anything! Is it like, hearing specific? I think I damaged my hearing in my punk youth; could it be some people just can’t register it?
No, I don’t think you’re doing it. I don’t hear any vocal fry in your comment.
My people! Thank you for saying this – I keep looking it up and I just don’t get it at all. I also don’t understand phonetics or syncopation, ha.
This list is utterly incomplete without Alaska Thunderf**k 5000: https://youtu.be/vH9RJOCWPJg
My refrigerator made vocal fry noises as I was reading this. It’s obviously trying to seduce the toaster oven.
There’s a This American Life piece on TAL listeners complaining about the show’s female reporters having vocal fry and at the end Ira Glass points out that he too has vocal fry. It’s amazing.
How did the execrable Garrison Keillor not make this piece?
Lakoff argues that the very things career coaches advise women to cut out of their speech are actually signs of highly evolved communication. When we use words like so, I guess, like, actually, and I mean, we are sending signals to the listener to help them figure out what’s new, what’s important, or what’s funny. We’re connecting with them. “Rather than being weakeners or signs of fuzziness of mind, as is often said, they create cohesion and coherence between what speaker and hearer together need to accomplish — understanding and sharing," Lakoff says. “This is the major job of an articulate social species. . ."
Language is not always about making an argument or conveying information in the cleanest, simplest way possible. It’s often about building relationships.
YES! This is what I've wanted to yell every time this shit comes up.
And, of course,
Indeed, as with salary negotiations in which women are damned if they don’t ask for a raise and penalized for being overly aggressive if they do, tweaking speech to be more direct and less deferential comes with its own consequences. “When women talk in ways that are common among women, and are seen as ineffective or underestimated, they're told it's their fault for talking that way,” the linguist Deborah Tannen, who’s written several best-selling books about gender and language, told me. “But if they talk in ways that are associated with authority, and are seen as too aggressive, then that, too, is their fault when people react negatively.” Asking women to modify their speech is just another way we are asked to internalize and compensate for sexist bias in the world. We can’t win by eliminating just from our emails and like from our conversations.
David Bowie.
David Bowie.
Yay, Jaya! One of the nerdy linguist blogs I follow recapped your post, and was also like “yeah vocal fry is neither a new thing nor a specifically feminine thing,” so I am pleased on both counts.
Language Log gets all the hearts forever.
Yay, Jaya! One of the nerdy linguist blogs I follow recapped your post, and was also like "yeah vocal fry is neither a new thing nor a specifically feminine thing," so I am pleased on both counts.
I haven’t gotten a chance to watch any of the videos, so I assume they all show tiny fish pouring from people’s mouths when they talk. “Kids these days! Why, in my day, you saved those vocal fry up and made a good bouillabaisse!”
Lolol as a person _scratch that_ woman who just got told she’s aggressive in her last performance review, I find that my vocal fry (which I enjoy, both in my voice and in other women’s voices) tends to ramp up when I am trying to speak slower/less forcefully than my natural rate of speech. Not saying it’s not a thing anyway, but possibly the current cultural freakout is backlash to a backlash?
I’m also willing to accept that I’m just completely under Ira Glass’s spell.