My sister lives in Los Angeles, and has picked up this irritating verbal tic, “uptalk”, which means that she uses an interrogative tone even when making statements such as: “I never want to talk to you again (?)” In the old days I could pretend to listen to her on the phone while actually reading a book — I would do this by keeping one ear on her intonation and lobbing a well-placed “in principle, I would say yes”, after every one of her high notes. These days when I do that she sighs and says flatly: “It wasn’t a question, Stefanie.”
But uptalk has spread far beyond California and the dur-brained Valley Girls who are supposed to have invented it. An article in last week’s New York Observer confirms that “high-rise terminals” have infected the East Coast, while psychology professors writing in the Toronto-based Globe and Mail talk of an “epidemic” in Canada. We won’t even talk about Australia.
In this country uptalk is still a burgeoning trend. John Humphrys has not yet stooped to introducing the “Today programme?” Nevertheless, it is spreading — especially among women — and, more worryingly, is being championed by the most cunning and manipulative section of society: and yes, I do mean children. They get it from the television, apparently. I, for one, am glad that I don’t come home to a six-year-old who talks like Philip Seymour Hoffman imitating Truman Capote.
A few years ago I would have been able to say: I have some bad news for you six-year-olds. Because, back then, the view held by experts was that uptalk was a symptom of self-doubt: framing your statements as questions was thought to indicate a desire for approval. Research by DiResta Communications in 2001 found that uptalk was “destroying the credibility of millions of professionals who are unknowingly falling victim to this increasingly common form of speech”. DiResta claimed that uptalk was the result of having either foreign parents or low self-esteem. The bottom line was that nobody could take you seriously as a boss when you pronounced “You’re fired!” as “You’re fired?” But the experts have changed their minds; the prevailing wisdom now holds that incorporating high-rise terminals, or HRTs, into your speech is actually a means of controlling your interlocutors, of compelling a response, if only an internal one, and of establishing common ground.
New studies show that people who use uptalk are not insecure wallflowers but powerful speakers who like getting their own way: teachers, talk-show hosts, politicians and facetious shop assistants.
Mark Liberman, a phonetician at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been monitoring George W. Bush’s speeches on his fascinating weblog Language Log, points out that the President has started peppering his Iraq speeches with HRTs. Why? Not, apparently, because Bush’s confidence is failing him. Rather, it has more to do with an aggressive need to direct conversation. Liberman quotes from a linguistics paper published last year in which scientists counted the number of HRTs used in real-life conversations: “In four business meetings . . . the chairs (sic) used rise tones almost three times more often than the other participants did.
“In conversations between academic supervisors and their supervisees, the supervisors used rise tones almost seven times more often than the supervisees. So maybe the problem with ‘Valley Girls’ and other youth of the past couple of decades,” continues Liberman, “is really that they’re, like, totally self-confident and socially aggressive?” This news seems to have percolated down to primary schools ages ago. Parents: you are being had.
I can't blame the boy's attack on men's mags
It was about the time that a 14-year-old schoolboy jumped me around the corner from work one afternoon that I began thinking about the evils of men’s magazines. I’d been walking along happily when the kid decided to do an impersonation of a rutting dog and deposited some of his DNA on the back of my dress. He scuttled off but, being rather chubby, did not stand a chance against a passing jogger who had no trouble fulfilling a lifetime’s ambition of single-handedly apprehending a sex offender. Standing there holding on to the boy’s ear while the police came, I had the opportunity to watch a budding sexual deviant burst into tears several times, howling like a child — which, of course, he still was.
“You’re like my sister, I swear,” he remonstrated, to which I replied: “Do you normally simulate sex with your siblings?” He didn’t know what siblings were. He hardly knew what sex was.
The whole thing sparked off a period of introspection. Wasn’t the incident a symptom of what the feminist writer Ariel Levy calls the “raunch culture” — the sexualisation of our society by the editors of men’s magazines and the models that they put on their covers? I decided it was. How could a boy in hormonal flux not be confused by Ann Summers window displays and Jordan’s plastic jugs? I’m sorry to say that it is this kind of unsubstantiated logic that often passes for “feminist thinking” these days. In Maureen Dowd’s new book, Are Men Necessary? (If I tell you that she blames society as a whole for the fact that she’s single, can you guess the answer?), the New York Times columnist claims that feminism is dead on the basis that she can’t get any dates. All men want is pneumatic airheads, she says, which explains why successful, attractive women (like, well, her) remain unattached. She backs it up with some random statistics and quotes from back issues of Cosmopolitan.
Turning a personal experience into a generalisation is a peculiarly feminine trait, and although the book is terrible I’m sure that it will sell because, like many hypotheses of this kind, it taps into what women are good at, better even than most gay men, which is belligerent self-pity. It’s true that FHM is vulgar and that younger women have fewer crow’s feet, but that doesn’t fully explain why Maureen Dowd is single or why I was leapt on.
In the end my teenage assailant admitted that it was an argument with his (single) mother combined with the sight of one of my shoe laces that inexplicably set him off. He’d never read FHM.
