I want to just say that it isn’t just girls. I think it is an age thing. I have two kid cousins, a boy and a girl age 14 and 10, and they do this. I make fun of them but it hasn’t had an effect yet.
Also there is a cartoon short on the Disney channel (I have small kids) that has a little boy named Max that speaks with Mutant Teenage Question Marks. It drives me insane. I want to stab my head with scissors whenever I hear it. I just wonder if a forensic scientist/detective would make the time-of-death connection to the airing of “Max”.
BTW, “Teenage Mutant Question Marks” is such an appropriate term. Very good. Kudos.
I suspected that might have something to do with it. Still, I think one can learn to not do that sort of thing. That’s why my admonition was to the parents rather than Pitting the poor kids.
p.s. I’m glad everybody likes the thread title. I couldn’t resist, what with all the felatio threads out there right now.
Currently there is a commercial for a financial advisors group playing on the radio station that I have my alarm clock set to. The narrator of the commercial raises his register at the end of every sentence as described in the OP. It drives me nuts. I can’t help but mock the narrator and the company that paid for the commercial. Confidence in the company is not being inspired. Each statement is being read as a question by a man who sounds completely usure of what he is saying.
Thanks, Gundy. I was going to add the “And then he was like, and then I was like” bit.
I work with a fifty-year-old woman who does it incessantly, and ends her sentences on a higher pitch than I’ve ever heard. She’s extremely insecure, and I don’t want to offend her by explaining that it makes her sound vulnerable. It drives me crazy, though, because she does open herself up to verbal attack by doing it.
When my staff talks like that, I always ask, “Was that a statement or a question?” At first, I could see the confused looks on their faces, but lately, they have started to get away from this habit.
I too believe it is a confidence issue as the ones I ask this question too mostly are young women, under 25 yrs of age. I don’t see this pattern among the young males I have on staff.
Purely anctecdotal, I know, but that’s my experience.
Steven Fry once noted that it seems as though, by making all statements into questions, it’s a way of getting around ever saying anything firmly, and thus a way of avoiding conflict/offense. Because if everything is a question? Then I’m never really saying anything that couldn’t be retracted? You know?
Good freakin’ lord. The evidence that it’s a confidence thang is that it’s young girls who use this voice pattern, right? Isn’t that just a wee bit of circular logic, since we’re concluding from this voice pattern that the people doing it lack self-confidence?
I’d guess just the opposite: teenagers in the US are notorious for forming their own speech patterns that build walls between themselves and their elders, as a way of strengthening their ties to one another. And US adults are infamous for getting their underpants all knotted up over it. It’s hilarious.
I know girls and women who talk like this, and since I’ve got more than two neurons to rub together, I can distinguish between their interrogative and declarative sentences. I don’t need to undermine their communication by pretending ignorance, and I don’t lack so much self-confidence that I gotta build up my own ego at the expense of girls and young women who talk differently from me.
Geez Louise. It’s not like they’re saying nukular.
Great quote, Xixox. I’ve forwarded it to my mother, a high school teacher. She would mock me expertly when I went through my Valley Girl phase - “Like gag me!” or she’d just scream “Spit it out, SPIT IT OUT!”
I once dated a woman from New Zealand (no airhead her, a Ph.D student) who did this occasionally. I seem to remember that she said it was a fairly common speech pattern in her part of NZ, the Southland–any confirmation from our Down Under Dopers on that?
Yikes, guy, decaf, please. I think I said at the end of my post that my supposition was not a scientific study, however, these are people that I have now worked with for over a year. I know how they speak and I know under what circumstances they use the “upspeak” And, I do not view my reaction as “getting my undies in a knot” but rather, helping them reach the next level as it were. The same as I would question the use of the word “ain’t” in a formal communication or meeting setting. It may be acceptable when we talk but it is not when you are talking to the president of the company. And, if you want him to remember you as someone who has potential and not some ditz, then you refrain from the speech patterns learned in high school or college. As a leader, it is my responsibility to provide my staff with this type of info and feedback.
A study (Parker & Riley, 1994) was done where the following was observed:
Females tend to use:
• more standard forms than males
• more tag questions (e.g., a questions at the end of a sentence such as “isn’t that right?”)
• more hedges (sort of, I guess)
• question intonation on declarative statements (thus, females sound more tentative even when stating a fact)
• more euphemisms (e.g., ladies room rather than toilet)
• more specialized vocabularies in domains such as color schemes (e.g., crimson)
• fewer taboo terms for sexual and bodily functions
Parker, F., & Riley, K. (1994). Linguistics for non-linguists: A primer with exercises (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
So the OP’s statement is valid and is something we need to teach our daughters to avoid. I’ve observed it and it sounds like others have as well. Whether or not it is indicative of a lack of confidence or a learned behavior, or both, is likely subjective to each girl/woman. However, it does occur and it does lower the projected confidence of the speaker.
I just read a book (Straight Man, by Richard Russo) where the main character’s secretary talked this way. No sentence spoken by her was without a question mark. I found it very easy to imagine this character–wasn’t a flattering picture.
Okay. So I’m 18 and female. I know that the only time I fall into the pit of “like” is when I’m angry and ranting about what some “hideous jerk of guy, who can’t really know what he’s talking about because who can really see inside of me and he’s just like, so . . . ARGH!” has done to me or to one of my friends. I also do it when I’m having a low blood sugar, because my brain goes wiggy on me. Otherwise, I’m an articulate person. (Pardon my ego.)
Of course, I’m drawing to the close of my adolescense and I’ve had the unusual (from what I hear) circumstances of being completely aware that my parents love me unconditionally and will support me in whatever I do, though I do hope they’d draw the line at me turning into mass murderer or something like that. At that point, I hope they’d disown me.
I don’t really notice this habit in anybody but the freshmen girls who have tanned themselves into another race and have difficulty keeping their eyes open due to the liner and mascara caked on there. I have to admit I’m not fond of those girls because they think the only way they can get boyfriends is by laying out the entire buffet, so to speak, and by being willingly to drink themselves into comas. Ah, I’d like to talk to them and show them that there’s more to life.
