While on the subject of speech affectations, the constant use of “So …” preceding every sentence is a little weird. Also, ppl who dont organize their thoughts before speaking and use “Uh, uh, uh …” to fill in the gaps until they can come up with something.
Meh. People who rid their casual speech of discourse markers are almost always regarded as less trustworthy by listeners and comprehension goes down as well.
Three pages and no explanation of why it’s called “fry”, though. What does fry in any sense (cooking in fat, baby fish…?) have to do with this croaky sound?
I think it’s an idea that you’re frying your vocal cords and they hiss and pop like bacon in a hot skillet. Beats me.
It never ceases to amaze me how completely oblivious to vocal mannerisms I am. I am generally fairly observant and detailed about most things , but all these things take me a huge effort of concentration to detect what is being referred to. The Bush link above, and the defenestration chick I could eventually hear, but It would never ever occur to me organically that there is anything noticeable there.
Maybe it is a consequence of Growing up around Colorado, where everybody is from somewhere else, and there is no “normal” speech I ever had a concept of. Or maybe its just something my toddler brain just decided to ignore.
Accents amaze me as well, there are maybe 15 accents to English language for me in the whole world. I just have no natural process running to try to detect anything but the most obvious vocal cues. ETA actually that is not true. My brain does search for hidden cues, but for like cues they are lying, cues they are nervous etc, just not the vocal details of the sound in question.
Hah! I sneer at the puny examples posted thus far, so I’ll show you what I was talking about with Amy Goodman. This was not cherry-picked; it was the top of the list of her reporting (second overall, after a video of her being arrested for something) when I Googled youtube amy goodman:
Can males do vocal fry? “Dr Phil”, the TV quack, always sounds like he’s straining to pinch a loaf.
All the time. It’s a staple of certain types of singing and any baritone pretending at being a bass is going to fry those low notes.
I just want to force feed her soothing substances. Ice cream, olive oil, cooling peppermint tea.
Wow, she is really unpleasant to listen to. I’d definitely find her even more annoying if I was just *hearing *her, but looking at her my first thought is to attribute her voice to age and possibly smoking. Either way, not a radio friendly voice.
I’ve been reading random posts about vocal fry since around when this thread started. Too bad it took months for links to non-exaggerated vocal fry examples to be offered (the NPR segments). 
I gotta say that it boggles my mind that it bothers people. It sounds like a perfectly normal way of speaking. Now, if people went around talking like the super-exaggerated example (exaggerate the fryx10,000 and add in Valley Girl inflection AND up talk AND super long pauses AND…), sure, that’d be irritating.
But even the “omgicantstandhowthisreportertalksLISTEN!” sound completely inoffensive to me.
It took me awhile to understand exactly what was meant also, but now that I know,
Bob Garfield’s podcast on his hatred for vocal fry (but with a guest offering linguistic defenses of it) has touched off an uproar at Slate, with over a thousand comments so far:
I will be curious to see whether it does become just a normal speech pattern as these girls and young women become middle aged; or whether it will be an affectation they drop. Will those of us who find it annoying just be increasingly marginalised and drop off? Does it in fact hurt one’s vocal cords, as this YouTube video claims? If true, that would provide an objective reason to oppose it, rather than just subjective irritation with how it sounds.
I also am interested in what the underlying motive is (or at least was, originally). I was surprised to hear it being associated with sophistication as it sounds unsophisticated to me. But looking at examples from this thread, I can see how it might feel sophisticated compared to just being giggly and high pitched, I suppose. I always took it as a way of defensively inoculating onesself (as adolescents are wont to do) from being mocked for too much earnestness. Vocal fry can sound (or at least, again, this was perhaps the original motivation before it became so ubiquitous) aloof, disinterested, a signal that “you can’t tear down what I’m saying because I’m not really committed to it anyway and I’m vaguely bored”.
I think the reason it is becoming so ubiquitous is that it’s frigging contagious! When people talk like that around you, it becomes difficult not to emulate them.
It is supposed to sound cynical and world-weary. The voice of someone who has seen it all and isn’t impressed.
I really don’t get the hatred for a little quirk of dialect that’s barely noticeable. (In the case of Amy Goodman, I don’t think it’s an affectation; it sounds like it’s just her voice, quite possibly helped along the way by a smoking habit.) It will come and go, as such things do. As speech fads go it’s not one tenth as noticeable and irritating as the obsession with the word “basically” that took off like a rocket about 20 years ago.
I’ve been watching for examples of vocal fry since this thread popped up. Finally saw it on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (don’t judge me).
A wronged wife (Brandi Granville) was confronting one of her ex-husband’s mistresses, Scheana somebody, a waitress. Scheana’s tone of voice changed to the vocal fry when she was no longer in the hot seat.
She started by apologizing to Brandi, tearfully. When Brandi refused to let her off the hook, Scheana got defensive and her voice got steadily lower. She was full on frying when she told Brandi that Brandi’s friends knew about the cheating. Defense to offense, from “I’m so sorry” to “It wasn’t my fault and your friends aren’t really your friends”.
Scheana had seen that she was indeed off the hook, because she’d gotten Brandi to focus on the role her friends played in the affair. So in this case, your “not really committed and vaguely bored” is a good description of a situation where someone fried.
I looked for a clip but can’t find one.