Here's another thing young whippersnappers are doing to annoy me.

I like SciShow on YouTube and watch it all the time. They’ve have a relatively new host, Olivia Gordon, who is fine except for two things: her nose ring looks like a booger and, very much more annoyingly, she does a weird thing with her voice. Here’s the latest video where she doesn’t wear the ring but continues to talk in that weird-ass way.

She ends almost all of her sentences way in the back of her throat, stretching out the words into an almost-growl. What is that? Why are a bunch of cool-hipster kids now talking that way? And why won’t they get offa my lawn?

An example of vocal fry. She does do it a lot.

And I hate to break it to you, but there is still a nose ring in that video.

The [del]booger[/del] nose ring is there.
If you hadn’t mentioned the voice I wouldn’t have noticed it. And I’m near lawn age.

It’s a much smaller ring then. Vocal fry is a good name for it. Sounds like her cords are sizzling in a pan.

Hipster drawl

Eventually, you’ll get to my stage of hearing loss and it won’t bother you any more…huh, what?

This had bugged me for so long I feel like I was the first to discover it. I have a cow-orker whose vocals fry so severely you wanna toss some bacon down there.

Nails meet chalkboard.

And please remove yourself from the grassy area in front of my domicile.
mmm

Apparently I don’t notice vocal fry, which is odd because I’m attuned to and imitative of speech styles, inflections, accents etc. Maybe I do it myself. The nose ring doesn’t bother me because my step daughter wears one. I admit at first I thought it looked like a booger, but now I don’t notice it. Also I think Olivia Gordon is really attractive, so that distracts me from the nose ring and vocal fry.

You know what bugs me more than the vocal fry (which, yeah, she has a really bad case of)? The unnecessary edits/cuts between each sentence when the shot is just of the host speaking. This seems to be a common editing style used by many youtube channels. I guess it’s supposed to make the video more ‘dynamic.’ Once you notice it, though, it’s just an obvious and irritating gimmick–especially since it’s so common. Not quite as bad as the intentional shaky-cam style, but still annoying.

The other aspect of the production that’s notable is the camera angle, chosen to hide the fact that she’s standing on my lawn. But I know, I saw the trampled grass.

I have two complaints about this generation’s female newscasters: First, they dress/are dressed in nightclubbing clothing; two, the vocal fry. It’s especially awful when reporting on horrible happenings.

Do media folk not go to broadcasting school anymore?

Yeah, this. Apparently they don’t want us to see that she takes a breath between sentences. It’s like squashing the video.

Many women in TV commercials speak this way. It is annoying.

I keep hearing it’s a mostly woman thing but I gotta say there are a lot of guys with stupid hats and ridiculous facial hair who talk like that around here.

It’s the opposite. They never used to. The media employed people who knew how to speak, and there were no broadcasting schools. Now, they employ anyone, regardless of talent, who enrolled in media/journalism school and didn’t flunk out.

Women everywhere have always spoken with gender-specific intonations and vocal characteristic, some languages and cultures more conspicuously than others. Brought first to our attention by Valley Girls. Before about 1970, female broadcasters were an extreme rarity. Sending them to broadcasting school didn’t cure them of it, but rather it regularized and standardized the form

My husband works in television. His former employer used to take Northeastern students for their working semesters. A depressing number of them, men and women, had no interest in working hard and just wanted to be in front of the camera. This, more than once, led to female students coming to a production dressed for the club when they were expected to be running cable and getting dirty.

By far the best they ever had worked her ass off behind and in front of the camera. She did whatever they asked and more. Now she has a degree in journalism and is a sportscaster in IL and she dresses appropriately, speaks well, and obviously enjoys her job. She is one of the nicest and hardest working people I’ve ever met.

Unfortunately, she is apparently unusual for this.

In my local news they apparently have journalists students apply for jobs…these are the most idiotic young people I have ever heard talk on camera…Every other word is umm or like or hmm…they cannot answer the studio anchors…EVER…They are just retards or something!!

If you all hadn’t been so cranky about valley girl speak, women would not be so self-conscious about up-rising. And it’s not limited to women, or for that matter, hipsters or kids either.

Agreed, the vocal fry is annoying.

I don’t think the nose ring flatters her and she’d be more attractive without it. But I can overlook it, probably because my son’s girlfriend (practically my daughter-in-law; they’ve been together forever and she and I get along great) has a nose ring that actually looks pretty nice, believe it or not. But she is 1/2 Indian, and her facial features somehow complement the look.

I refuse to listen to the video. Is this the same thing they call “croaking”? Can’t fucking stand it!