Does listening to someone talking with a fry voice bother you?

Vocal fry is an obnoxious habit that does seem to be spreading. Even as a youngster (long ago), I heard a small number of people speak with this trait, seemingly because they couldn’t help it, but now it’s being cultivated. A young woman phoned the other day from my bank, and I wouldn’t talk to her because this habit of speech was too jarring.

gravelly (“gravely” is grave-ly—i.e., in a grave or serious manner)

A bit.
What really makes me sick is listening to the Orangutan talk.

Sorry about mispelling gravelly.

I find it off-putting. I have a friend who talks that way. All her sentences end that way; she also has what is essentially a “valley girl” accent. I can’t believe people actually talk like that naturally. It’s sometimes used as a joke (for those of you who watch Bob’s Burgers, think of the character Jocelyn and the way she talks), but it also seems common with young women (that and ending every sentence with an interrogative inflection). In fact, I read that it is more common now than it was in the past and nobody knows why.

Here’s a video demonstrating the sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8mcBdBL-t0

It’s new to me so I’m looking up a video to find an example for it. I can say that I’m not that bothered by it so long as I can clearly decipher every words they utter. We need more unique talkers! If all people talk in a boring normal/conventional way then there would be nothing special about the way they speak.

Yes – that and the uptick of 30 somethings bother me.

Never heard of it. So I googled “vocal fry” and got Billy West, apparently the guy who does the voice of Fry on Futurama. So I dug deeper, and found an actual definition. I also learned that such luminaries as Zoey Deschanel & Kim Kardashian are famous (notorious?) for habitually lowering their voice to “gargle talk”. I swear I wouldn’t have known (or noticed) What a world.

Can someone send me an example? Do they maybe think it sounds sexy or something?

Does this count?

OK, then yes. They think it sounds sexy and yes, it would annoy me. Anything fakey annoys me.

I didn’t mind it when you heard it very occasionally but since it became an affectation copied by millions it gets on my nerves.

The fry voice is annoying in person, but I find it funny when used in comedy standups, especially when portaying a neurotic character

I refuse to listen to it. We had a bit of a discussion a few years ago here, and the consensus at the time was the (self-serving) Ira Glass/NPR take that people who don’t like it are a) old and b) policing women’s speech (a certain thorn in mud contributor here and I were chased away for exhibiting interest in the topic). While those are valid things to consider, the fact that it is an affect that spread very fast and is identified as untrustworthy, etc. means that it’s something we should at least be talking about. It is far from a women thing, and most often a “trying to sound smart” thing. Most of us adjust our speech patterns and tone depending on who we are talking to.

In the 1990s, we saw the adoption of the intentional stutter (think Christopher Lydon and faux intellectualism) in the general public – especially in upper class highly-educated people. This stuff is fascinating to me. How speech patterns and language spread – especially in the highly-connected world of the internet – is something I have an interest in. But vocal fry is both interesting from a “how did it spread” perspective as well as “what does it say to those who don’t speak with a fry”.

There are great authors that I will not listen to in audio format (podcasts) because of the fry problem. I literally cannot understand them or hear them. It distracts so much from the content that it just results in me drifting off into a series of internal questions and alienation.

@notnotnotnot The first time I heard the term “vocal fry” was from that thread and thorninmud’s description of it. Then I started to notice it more and more. The only positive thing about hearing it is that it makes me think of him.

Oh, who was that guy on Independence Day….Harvey Fierstein. His voice was very unique and I’m sure it was natural. However, I think it would be jarring to try and have any kind of long conversation with him.

NPR’s correspondent in France used to bug me. Either she is losing the fry or I’m accustomed to it. It used to sound like she was burping her report.

It’s as common for males as females I think. Teen and twenty-something boys do it. Think frat boys. Or the kids I hear on the train, working their first jobs out college.

I don’t like it for the same reasons others don’t. I’ll just add that it’s bad for the voice, in case any any aspiring singers are reading this thread.

I’m with @notnotnotnot on this one. It bugs the absolute shit out of me.

Here’s some good examples of vocal fry on NPR.

@janbb That’s a classic example. Vibrato in singing can be beautiful. Fry talking is kind of like a vibrato of speech and it’s like fingers nails on a chalkboard.

I haven’t seen anyone do that in real life. I have only experienced them from videos. So 100% of the time it happens I use a headphone.

And yeah, I can’t stand that kind of sound for an extended period of time. When someone talks like that for more than 1 minute, I feel an itchy sensation in my ears. I don’t know if that’s the effect of the headphone though.

Why do people write “fry voice” rather than “fried voice”?

Why do people write “fry voice” rather than “fried voice”?

IA little googling tells me “fry” is a linguistic term going back 50+ years. It is derived from the sound of frying food, but the word is “fry” used as a noun.

This blog post references 1960s papers “On the nature of vocal fry” and J Speech Hear Res. 1966; “Vocal fry as a phonational register”, J Speech Hear Res. 1968

I’ve never heard the term as “fry voice’ in any case until this thread. It’s usually referred to as “vocal fry.”

Fry as a noun, as in “fish fry” or even “vocal fry”, is one thing, but as an adjective as in “fry voice”?

That’s just a convention of English. Is “singing” an adjective in the phrase “singing voice”? Not really. It’s a verbal noun. English allows nouns to be strung together unlike most other languages. So saying “fry voice”, while maybe not the preferred terminology among linguists, is not really turning “fry” into an adjective, but simply a noun denoting the type of voice. The voice with a fry, the fry voice, etc.

I love when questions become grammar discussions :D

It’s actually pretty popular in my area, as seen on tv and radio. Personally, I’m not a big fan.

Oh my goodness. I had never heard this term before I clicked on this thread. One of my cousins slips into this voice sometimes. It seems like she does it when she is “talking down” to us, as if she has to alter her voice to fit in with the commoners.

@Demosthenes It seems to me that the ability to use a noun as an adjective doesn’t work so well when there is an easy (and more accurate) adjective form of the same root to use.

Saying “fry voice” to mean “fried voice” seems like someone is making a point of not saying “fried voice”, and sounds to me as if it’s more likely that it means “a voice affected by having recently eaten French fries”.

That is, “fry voice” may not be an ungrammatical form, but I don’t think it implies the intended meaning, which seems to be “fried voice”.

The noun chosen is a weird one to use as an adjective to mean that, because not only is “fry” usually a verb and not a noun, but “fry” as a noun means something fried, which is already an adjective.

I don’t think your suggested parallel “singing voice” matches. I think the equivalent would be to note that “sing” can be a noun, and then to refer to a “sing voice”.

To answer the OP: I will answer against the prevailing opinions that seem to be all negative. I couldn’t care less.

To address the grammatical issue: I clicked on this question because of the odd way it’s asked. I have never thought of using “fry” as an adjective. After reading the question, its details, and the thread, I don’t like it. It grates my sensitivities in a way that many on this thread find grating about hearing vocal fry.

@Zaku The issue here is that the term “vocal fry” has disconnected from the verb “to fry”. No one would say “fried voice” because the term “fry voice” is simply a reworking of “vocal fry”. The verb was never used in other tenses in this context; “vocal fry” is a noun outright. It’s two words, but it functions as a unit.

To be able to say “fry voice” implies that “fry” has become a noun in its own right referring to the vocal fry (almost as if you were saying “vocal fry voice”). But I don’t think that it has. This concept is obscure to begin with, so it hasn’t gained traction in the language. It is certainly possible for “fry” to become a noun like “falsetto” so that one can speak of a person using falsetto and a person using fry. But right now the term is “vocal fry”. “Fry” alone doesn’t cover the concept.

@Demosthenes My issue may be that I have never heard the term “vocal fry” either. If I had, then “fry voice” might seem more appropriate to me.

“My voice is fried” (meaning worn out and sounding thrashed) is definitely something I have heard, however, although I am not clear whether it means the same thing as this “vocal fry” or not?

@Zaku, it’s not an issue of grammar. The term for the phenomenon is vocal fry (not “fry voice”). Using it in this context simply refers to the established term. You might want to take issue with the people who coined the term, but that would be another discussion.

(The term was correctly introduced in the first response above.)

However, we do use attributive nouns naturally and correctly in English all the time: home security, pencil sharpener, horse race, foot surgery. Fry cook. The fact that a word is a noun does not mean you can’t put it in front of another noun in a meaningful relationship.

@Jeruba Yeah, as I just wrote @Demosthenes , it sounds weird to me because I have not heard the term “vocal fry” before, but I have heard “fried voice”, so “fry voice” sounds makes me think “why are they not saying ‘fried voice’?”

I still don’t know whether there is a difference between “fry voice” and “a fried voice”?

Well, they aren’t saying “fried voice,” they’re saying “vocal fry,” so that’s one difference.

@Zaky Its bar fly voice or whiskey voice. The “fry” is odd to my ears, too.

Its characteristic is not the gravelly tone itself but the drop from the normal tone to the low, scraping one at the end of a sentence. Sort of the opposite of the rising intonation at the end in uptalk.

Ok, thanks folks, and sorry for threadjacking to try to understand what “fry voice” is… I’ll have to study up on the term. ;-)

Because the voice sounds like it’s in the process of being fried @Zaku.

Sorry about my sloppy grammar and poor spelling. Good spelling and good grammar are important to me. However I’ve struggle all my life with this. In college I learned early that misspelling a single word in an essay or report would destroy it. The reader loses the ideas presented and fixates on the error while enjoying a good laugh.

I seem to be blind to my own spelling errors. But always think, “Of course!” when someone points them out to me.

I have never really noticed @gondwanalon.