What things about NPR broadcasts bother you, other than the content?

“So” is a habit, as are rising inflections. The latter seems to be a bit epidemical.
Repeating the name is a common technique to remember names. Could be mandated by the station. “Sorry, what was your name again?” could be embarrassing to both sides. Especially in a high turnover situation, like radio, where countless people call in in rapid succession, remembering every name on the spot is nigh on impossible. Hence the repetition.

@ragingloli No – that’s the name of the person being interviewed for 30 minutes to an hour. I think the reasoning is for listeners to hear who it is but the repetition is still annoying.

I know that the rising inflections are a generational thing, the repetitive “so” I’ve only heard on NPR consistently.

If it is the name of a 30 minute interviewee it is even more justified.
People do not listen to a broadcast from the beginning. They tune in in the middle and then they do not know who is being interviewed unless the name is repeated often.

I’ve noticed that my European friends are more likely to use First name + Last name than North Americans. Maybe it’s something she picked up from her family, or maybe it’s a personal affectation, which she believes is style. Not really the fault of NPR as a whole.

I guess I know the kind of irritation you’re talking about. But honestly, when I listen to CBC (which is our public radio), I am more often irritated by the things that made CBC the institution that it is, but have now been lost. Things like correct grammar and pronunciation, and at least a touch of formality.

@ragingloli Hey – I’m just venting. I’m not looking for justifications. I’m sure you’re right; that doesn’t stop it from annoying me. :-) I do think she could vary it a bit by using just the first name occasionally..

@dappled_leaves Well, when someone else does her show, they do the exact same thing.

Anyway, this is a just for fun question; there are much bigger fish to fry in this world.

@janbb Interesting! It has to be the show’s writers, then.

@dappled_leaves Yes. And the sub uses exactly the same verbal mannerisms she does.

1)

Terri Gross constantly repeating the first and last name of the interviewee, “Well, John Doe…..”

That is for listeners who tune into the middle of the interview, otherwise they don’t know who is on. For long-form radio I think it’s standard practice.

2)
The one thing that really bugs me is the Paris reporter with the vocal fry. She sounds like she’s burping her reports.

I’m not sure if it’s as bad as it was during the 90s and 2000s, but the intentional stuttering was over the top. It started to rub off on the guests, and eventually became identified with thoughtful liberalism. I began to hear it when people would start lecturing me on gentrification.

The rising inflection at the end is definitely not limited to nor created by NPR.

It’s called “upspeak” and it’s annoying beyond description.

Terry Gross does this? Ugh. It’s been awhile since I’ve heard one of her interviews but I’ve always enjoyed her and found her to be intelligent and incisive.

Is the upspeak thing on her part a recent habit? I’m pretty sure I would have noticed. As I mentioned, it gets on my last nerve and makes the speaker sound like a vacuous dolt.

I think the upspeak thing is literally childish, when you are young and unsure even a statement can come out as a quasi-question, ‘cause in any area of experience there will be the times when you don’t know what you don’t know, even how to say something.
It’s like: <what I’m saying> plus the question that is implied by the upspeak
... ‘did I state that correctly?’ and/or ‘do you understand what I said?’ .

But keeping the habit beyond the point when you ought to have enough confidence to make your statement, can seem un-responsible to me because it throws the burden of validation on the listener.

Or it can be a lazy jazzy way of just riffing on what occurs to you and uttering it without a rationality filter. Y’know?

Among familiars from whom sympathetic agreement is the norm, heads all wagging in emphatic agreement, adding the upspeak to the ends of lines can be an efficiency. It takes the place of adding “You know?” after an emphatic statement. When the chit chat is flowing the reply jumps right in to follow
It can be an appeal for response, like “can I get an ‘Amen!’”

Inappropriate for presenters, who should know what they’re talking about. In programming intended for an international audience (through radio and the web) a question should be a question, a statement should be a statement. Let’s not confuse everyone with dialectic tics.

I love NPR. But, one of my pet peeves is their alternating of sentences when there are two moderators.
They are clearly reading from a prepared text but he says a sentence; then she says a sentence; then he…
Ridiculous.

@LuckyGuy And on Radio Lab, they break sentences up and each just say a few words.

@Buttonstc No – I know the upspeak is not created by NPR and Terri Gross doesn’t do it. Some of the younger reporters do it.

I can’t listen to Diane Rhem. I know it’s insensitive and non-pc of me, but I can’t stand it. She had a stutterer on her program one time and I nearly went up in an exhibit of spontaneous combustion.

Back around 2000–2001, I used to grind my teeth every time they played Stormy Weather at the beginning of the Stock Report. Now, I just close the tab or click to other news. And that inflection thing is annoying as hell. Gag me with a spoon. Now we know where the Valley Girls went after four years of majoring in cheer leading at USC.

I was scrolling down trying NOT to read word for word (I wasn’t concsious of the over use of “SO”, until YOU brought it up thank you very much and it now drives me insaner.) and I’m pleased that @syz dissed Diane Rhem before I had to. I know she has a physical vocal condition but it’s just too distracting for me. I’ll listen to bits now and then, but can’t stand a steady diet.

Seriously, I think the use of “So” to begin a statement is epidemic. “So”, “SO, yeah”, “Yeah, so”. I have C&W on in the kitchen and whenever there is an interview, I hear someone say, “So, I was…”

I think that sometimes Snap Judgement host Glynn Washington is a little to glib and mellifluous in his delivery. To me it distracts from the programming and makes it seem fluffier.

My NPR is St. Louis derivative an there for weeks they were devoting every minute of local programming to Ferguson. I mean, up to hours a day. Days there was no rioting, they just re-hashed the story and brought in new people to re-tell yesterday’s programming.

As a side note, I heard a Ted Talk the other day that was, in my opinion, poor. I was shocked. The guy was “Telling it how it tells best”, and getting by with it.

Snap Judgement host Glynn Washington is a little to glib and mellifluous in his delivery. To me it distracts from the programming and makes it seem fluffier.

His breathless, anxious delivery is distracting.

I think he’s learning. The show has become better with time.

@janbb: That’s a stylistic choice on RadioLab from an audio production perspective. Same with their use of left-channel, right-channel switching. I actually like it quite a bit.

Fresh Air was my go-to interview show for years, but I got really tired of Terri Gross recently — so I switched to the Nerdist Podcast (much more fun).

I love Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me but Bill Curtis is starting to grate on me. I miss Carl Castle.

Twenty years ago when I frequently had to make long drives with nothing but the radio, I used to like NPR (usually All Things Considered, though, more than anything else). But now when I drive I have several thousand songs on my iPod, from Beethoven to PDQ Bach to Mozart to opera to Tom Lehrer and Tom Russell that I could listen for days with no repeats. So the only thing that bugs me about NPR now is… having to listen to it if there’s a problem with an iPod.

But yeah, I know that rising inflection at the end of a declarative sentence? That really bugs me? It does. It also bugs me when they attempt to show “both sides” in political debates, as if R and D represent the entire political spectrum in the USA.

I’m hearing more and more, not just on NPR but on every radio station, a vocal trend called Creaky Voice, also called “Vocal Fry.” Mostly young women but also young men do it presumably to sound more authoritative and/or sexy. You may not have heard the term, but I’m betting you’ve heard the sound. Absolutely drives me up the wall, like fingernails on a chalk board. Here is a YouTube video and an article on this irritating trend.

Gee, thanks, @Pachy.

Another annoying trend to make me insaner.

We can be insane together, @ibstubro. I’m especially sensitive to it because I do commercial vocal work and edit audios.

All of the above; I feel much better knowing that I’m not alone. I can’t stand the voices of more than a few of the American announcers. I tend to prefer the ones who are foreigners, like Ofeibea Quist-Arcton – I could listen to her for hours.

^ I just want to listen to her say her name, over and over. And “Dakar”. She always seems to be in Dakar.

Oh, that must be the, “DA-Khhhrr” woman.

I like Sylvia PaJOlie.

Yes! Audio of Ofeibea Quist-Arcton

Sylvia Poggioli is another favorite of mine, too!

My wife sounds like Silvia Poggioli when she speaks Italian.

If I’m in the car alone, I always have to repeat, aloud, “DA Khhhrr!”.

@ibstubro I like to try the Indian accent when I am alone. “There’ll be no more molly-coddling of Mullahs.”

The pretentious intellectualism-for-it’s-own-sake liberal snobbery.

“its”

I’ll have a word with iOS’s predictive text developers.

Just for you.

@SecondHandStoke Or you could just read what you write before posting.

Yeah.

Obviously I never do that.

Funny, on the last Q&A site I was active on, one of my buddies was a Tea Partier and strongly anti-abortion. She spouted off about the anti-abortion rally in Washington at the time being nearly totally ignored by the ‘liberal media’.

I told her I knew all about it. Linked her to the NPR report, and she was shocked that not only was the the best coverage she had seen, but found it totally fair and unbiased. She was impressed.

People that insist NPR is like Fox (where nothing is reported without a conservative slant), haven’t listened to NPR. I tend to be conservative, but prefer my news as ‘the facts, mam, nothing but the facts. I won’t pretend I haven’t turned NPR off because a particular show seemed to have an obvious bias, but that’s not the norm, and certainly not true of the news.

Brooke Gladstone from “On the Media” just makes me absolutely insane.

The tone, timber and animation of her voice are almost always incongruous with both the topic and the guest. I literally had to finally look up if she was actually interviewing – it sounds so much like she has lifted answers from a preexisting interview or speech and recorded questions to introduce the answers.
I mean, I could do this. How much does she get paid?
To a lesser extent I have the same problem with Bob Garfield. I think the producers are at fault.

Her voice totally distracts me from the interview.