Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "sociolinguistics"
Fry, baby, fry!
When you come “home” after years spent far away, you have to steel yourself for some reverse culture shock. Last time, there was less than I expected (though the rampant ageism in England was a surprise) but this time I got zapped in a place I didn't expect: language. Blimey, they don't half talk funny in England these days! Particularly the young, though more so on television than in the streets of Kent. Well, it's only natural that language should evolve, but the area of greatest innovation seems to have switched from vocabulary to sound. One phenomenon I've noticed is a restriction of the vocal chords, especially at the end of an utterance. It's something I've tried and failed to imitate, but thanks to Ian McEwan, I now understand what it's about. In his new, intriguing short novel, “Nutshell”, he mentions it and gives it a name: “vocal fry”, which means you can Google it. It turns out to have originated in the USA and to be prevalent among young women. Unlike young people's slang, which is intended to keep us oldies out, “vocal fry” aims to impress other youngsters, apparently by giving the speaker an air of sophistication. It is also a technique used by singers. One thing I've noticed in various languages is that people often constrict their vocal chords when they want to sound posh. This all begs the question of whether people fry their vocals deliberately or unconsciously. It also turns out that a lot of people dislike the sound. However, the reaction of my better half, a native speaker of Chinese, to one disdainful You Tube video, was that she preferred the sound of vocal fry to to the high-pitched whine of the young lady denouncing it. Personally, I'm just happy to have got a handle on it, and to know that it's not just my hearing aid playing up.
“Bloody Hell!”
In William Gibson's The Peripheral, a policewoman in the future London confirms her British identity for American readers by exclaiming “Bloody Hell!” Sadly, on a recent return to these shores I noticed the disappearance of the word “Bloody” from the contemporary British vocabulary. Cultural subservience to Hollywood and HBO now sends us straight to the F-word. Even in Grimsby, it seems, we want to gab like gangstas.
What's sad about that? Well, a couple of things. First, the purpose of swearing was to shock. But if you use a taboo word as though it were nothing unusual, it eventually loses its power to shock. It will retain little more than its ability to signify that you belong to a particular group: people who (imitate people who) would like to shock if only they could think of a ruder word than the F-word has become. Second, dear old “bloody” was useful in that it had just a little power to shock, because it was rude but less rude than other taboo words: you could break the taboo without breaking the vocabulary bank, leaving yourself options if you wanted to shock more later on. Now, I guess if you say “bloody”, it marks you as a fuddy-duddy. Maybe that's the real reason I want it back. Bloody hell fire!
What's sad about that? Well, a couple of things. First, the purpose of swearing was to shock. But if you use a taboo word as though it were nothing unusual, it eventually loses its power to shock. It will retain little more than its ability to signify that you belong to a particular group: people who (imitate people who) would like to shock if only they could think of a ruder word than the F-word has become. Second, dear old “bloody” was useful in that it had just a little power to shock, because it was rude but less rude than other taboo words: you could break the taboo without breaking the vocabulary bank, leaving yourself options if you wanted to shock more later on. Now, I guess if you say “bloody”, it marks you as a fuddy-duddy. Maybe that's the real reason I want it back. Bloody hell fire!
