The older among you might remember that at my last job, a woman one cubicle over from me (dubbed “The Pwincess Pwecious”) drove me stark staring mad by speaking in an oopsy-boopsy baby-talk voice. Bilingually, and no less annoying in either language.
It seems her mother, the 60-ish Empwess Pwecious, has followed me to my new job. *Nails *on a blackboard. Not just to me, I see others fleeing before her odious bleating. What makes it even worse is, she gets even more Betty Boopish when talking to men; I have heard her use an almost normal (more “Lisa Simpson”) voice when talking to women.
Thank goodness for my blessed iPod. When I see her approaching, I put on my headphones and crank up Spike Jones or Ethel Merman till my ears bleed. Deafness is preferable to jail, where I would surely land after picking the Empwess up by the thwoat and hurling her out the window.
Have you considered aversion therapy? You know, as in A Clockwork Orange? Maybe listen to Betty Boop endlessly with your iPod to desensitize? Or would that accidentally cause you to hate Apple products?
I have tried actually listening to her, hoping for comic effect. But when one of her flirt-targets came back after a vacation, she insinuated herself up to him and gurgled, “While you wewe away, I put youw sweatew on, 'cause I was so cowd and it kept me aww wawm,” at which point I shot myself.
Mind you, this woman is 60-ish and a dead ringer for Koo-Koo the Bird Girl in Freaks.
Does any guy, anywhere, ever find that sowt of fing attwactive?
The one woman like this I’ve met, I honestly thought she had a legitimate speech impediment at first. I mean, r’s and th’s are sounds people with palate defects often have trouble with, and she had kind a scar down her upper lip like you get with cleft palate surgery, so I was trying to be civilized and not take any notice. And then as soon as there were no males in the vicinity, she suddenly started enunciating like Rex fucking Harrison.
Then, as soon as we’re outside where thewe might be men, wight back to see’s ist a hepwess widdle giwl.
Scarily, yeah. I was in the pub with a bunch of guys and we started talking about the local Betty Boop and her itthy-bitthy lithpy adowability. Several of the guys said that voice gave them the screaming heebie-jeebies/made them want to gag/made them think she was a raving psycho who would cut it off in a heartbeat. One guy went all dreamy-eyed and said, ‘Actually, I think it’s kind of cute.’
The Fast Show had a running character along these lines. Power businesswoman, in the office with a female colleague, barking orders in complex technical jargon. Then a guy walks in and instantly she’s squirming on the edge of her desk and ‘Oooo!! HewwOOO! Could oo show me how to turn on this big scawy machine? I fink it’s called a computer! Tee-hee!’
The Empwess’ primary victim seems to. I had thought of him as a generally smart, together guy (also 60-ish), but he seems to *thrive *on that oopsy-boopsy cwap. He actually walks over to her desk to chat with her–voluntarily.
While I am thinking of Groucho’s line to Thelma Todd: “If ickle baby doesn’t stop talking wike dat, big mean pwofessor’s gonna kick *aww *her teef down her fwoat!”
I think I mentioned this in the previous pwecious pwincess thread but I used to work with a woman who did something like this. She spoke in this high falsetto voice that she apparently considered to be more ladylike. But the funny part was she couldn’t keep it up for very long. So if she was saying something that took more than a few seconds, she would start out in this high-pitched twittery voice and then suddenly her voice would drop a couple of octaves into her real voice.
