Aka creaky voice. One of four tones in the Burmese language! 
Maybe. Vocal fry as I understand it often occurs at the ends of words, a trailing down into the raspy registers, words ending in a growl. The throat-spit thing wasn’t a trailing off; it’s more steady through the whole syllables.
Do you hear a lot of vocal fry in the first few words of Moon’s narrative in the song? 0:21 or so here: “Like, totally … Encino’s, like, so bitchen’…” I actually don’t hear much fry if any; it’s something else going on. No doubt it’s not actually spit but it’s a weird way of speaking through the throat.
I don’t hear any vocal fry there, no. I’m not exactly sure what I’m picking up on there, though. There’s some back-of-the-throat glottal thing going on there, I think, but it’s not something I had noticed before until you pointed it out.
Definitely. Malibu surfer culture got mainstream attention as far back as 1957, when Frederick Kohner published the novel Gidget, a fictionalized account of his teen daughter Kathy’s learning to surf, including (many instances of) the surfer-slang adjective “bitchen”. (Kathy’s diaries from the same period have a sort of proto-Valley-Girl style: “Boy the surf was so bitchen today I couldn’t believe it” and so on.)
That is, like, a totally awesome reference!
I don’t think that’s, like, only in California? It, like, seemed to my friends and I that it, you know, got to the UK from, like, Australian soap operas? But, hey, sunshine, surf, pretty people in beachwear, it’s like toadally the same, right?
I took up the habit, in computer programs I wrote, of defining the California Booleans:
#define FER_SHURE 1
#define NO_WAY 0
and then using those throughout my code.
You guys have Valley Girls. We have Essex girls: Essex girl - Wikipedia
Yes, this seems clear. The HRT holds the floor for the speaker, who ends without it to signal others may speak.
I like your use of question marks to signal HRT. The speaker isn’t asking questions, but someone unfamiliar with Valley Girl speech patterns hears it intoned as questions that grammatically don’t make sense as questions.
I didn’t happen to be much of a Zappa fan when this all started, and didn’t spend time in the valley, so I had no idea at first what was going on. I happened to mentor young people in industry and took their speech patterns to indicate uncertainty and timidity. This association may not ever be possible for me to fully shake.
Oh, and Black Napkins later won me over.
I had to read this a few times before I realized you weren’t talking about hormone replacement therapy.
We’re not? O my. I’ve TOTALLY misread the situation.
I believe it is technically called a sociolect at that point, but it’s not that uncommon. There are those languages (e.g. East Asian ones) where learning from the wrong gendered speaker can make you sound different. And, of course, there are other sociolects in the US based on race, class, etc.
It’s not actually all that different from the male accent. It just added some extra features. The version in Zappa’s song sounds a lot more surfer boy than the higher pitched, more nasally version as it has expanded.
I help out as a practice judge with students preparing for an annual mooting (mock court) competition. I have to give them a lecture about uptalk more or less every year. It’s always the girls. I have to explain that when one is trying to sound ultra-authoritative, the last thing one should do is sound uncertain by uttering statements in a questioning tone.
The funny thing is that they always understand perfectly what I mean and immediately realise they shouldn’t do it - but it is ingrained enough they apparently don’t realise they are doing it
So…is “OMG WTF” a post-smartphone offshoot of valley girl speak?
I used to think this, too, until I heard linguist John McWhorter explain that it’s more about generously including the listener, than it is about insecurity or uncertainty;
“ Next time you find yourself feeling irritated by the way a woman speaks: ask yourself whether it’s truly the voice you find annoying — or rather the person it belongs to or the opinions they are expressing.”
Well, that’s a point. But does this bode ill for speech and communications education? “Oh, don’t bother training to speak with clarity and authority. However you learned to speak with your friends in junior high will do just fine.”
The most relevant part of this podcast is from 35:30 to 40:00
AAVE comes to mind. Gary Owen is a white stand-up comic, but he grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood/area, and his speech exhibits a lot of characteristics of AAVE. They (his pigmentation and his speech) make an unusual combo.
No more than all the other varieties of English that are being accepted. It’s just more that we’re reducing the stigma of non-prestige dialects. There will still be aspects that matter in any accent. And there will always be code switching in different circumstances. No one I know with a non-prestige dialect can’t shut it off when they need to seem “professional.”
I grew up in West Los Angeles (the City, not the Valley) and graduated from High School in 1982. It was very prevalent in the 70s when I was a kid. The Zappa song perfectly captured what had existed for a while. It was the LA version of what might be the East Coast socialite accent. It was the way the rich kids in LA talked which was not just the San Fernando Valley but also Beverly Hills, Bel Air and the Palisades.
I’m amused by all of the incorrect speculation from people who are of the wrong age and who were hundreds of miles away. San Bernardino? Seriously?