Valley Speak is far from gone - as recently as 2014 the BBC was bemoaning 'the unstoppable march of upward inflection.'īut supplanting it is the same kind of hand-wringing about something called vocal fry.
Think of the movies 'Clueless' and 'Legally Blonde.' ('My name is Hallie?') And adding meaningless placeholder words like 'like,' and 'you know,' and 'we should, like totally.' Whatever. This was the way so-called Valley Girls (as in from San Fernando, southern California) spoke, and It was about uptalk-inflecting statements upward at the end as if they were questions. HALLIE EPHRON: Way back in the 70s, there was much sturm und drang about how teenagers were ruining the English language with Valley Speak.
