I notice that the woman who reads the sponsor ads on MPR News pronounces words with /str/ as /shtr/, for example, deshtroy instead of destroy. Michelle Obama does, too.
Are you hearing this more on Division Shtreet here in Northfield? Do you find it shtrange? When you hear it, do you want to set people shtraight? If so, what’s your shtrategy? Reshtructure their jaw? Or do you reshtrain yourself?
Love this. I know exactly who you’re talking about and this has been driving me crazy for YEARS. I’ve also noticed that there are other female deejays on the same station that now seem to be emulating that same sound (like it’s their signature schtick). Did I mention this drives me crazy??!? Anyway, I was just recently trying to explain this to a friend of mine and I had a really hard time describing the sound — you have captured this perfectly. Very funny.
if we’re going to start worrying about pronunciation, maybe we should start with the river that flows through town or the shtreet in Minneapolis named after the Frenchman, or the Czech town to our west.
Griff, as long as you are scouring the planet looking for trivial things to annoy you (heh), are you aware of the “vocal fry”? This is a pattern of speech said to be popularized by the likes of the Kardashians and Britney Spears that college aged women are allegedly affecting. The last link has a clip from a Mae West movie which indicates that maybe this isn’t something new.
Here are a couple of links with mp3 samples:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/12/vocal-fry-creeping-into-us-speec.html
http://healthland.time.com/2011/12/15/get-your-creak-on-is-vocal-fry-a-female-fad/?xid=gonewsedit
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/12/13/the-linguistic-phenomenon-du-jour-vocal-fry/
I’d never of vocal fry, Curt. Thank you for the education.
Neither of these speech habits come close to annoying me as much as high rising terminal (HRT), also known as uptalk, upspeak, rising inflection or high rising intonation (HRI).
Curt, I just happened to mention this on facebook yesterday. It actually reminded me of some of the vocal mannerisms used with val-speak in the early 80’s. Everything old is new again. In other words, all you kids out there, you’ll look back on this 20 years from now and say “Man! I sounded like such a tool!” And you’ll be right, just like we were when we had to say it!
Well, then you’ll love this!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsE5mysfZsY
Jessica, Jerry, Phil and Griff, all the vocal affectations listed here are said to be affected by females. What’s up with that? If males have gone through vocal fads like the ones listed here, what are they?
I did send this link to my 19 year old daughter, who wrote back,
“I had never heard of the vocal fry, and I had to google a bunch of videos to listen to examples and I still don’t quite hear it. Well, I hear it, but it just sounds like normal talking to me, I guess that must mean I’m a vocal fryer!”
Maybe guys do catch-phrases. After all, you know many women that are willing to scream WASSSUP at each other? But out in California there have always been those guys that “do the Spicoli”, whether they surf or not!
Griff,
This is simply a regional or sub-cultural mispronunciation. I once knew someone who had grown up in rural southern Indiana who pronounced film as fillum. There are many such examples. I hear African Americans sometimes invert the s and k in ask so as to pronounce it as aks. I say tomahto you say tomayto. Some people lisp, oh th-ay can you th-ee … but th the sh is not a lisp…it’s simply a sub-cultural thing. But it is shloppy shpeech. A bit like using dd instead of tt in the middle of words like butter. I can live with it. Yo.
The linguistics blog Language Log has talked about so-called vocal fry, including
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3642
They are critical of the journalism coverage, as they usually are.
They also note the appearance of /tr/ pronounced /chr/, which is common.
And note that the phoneme in the middle of butter is neither dd nor tt; it’s called a tap, and is the same in, for instance, in latter and ladder. It’s not the consonant that changes, it’s the preceding vowel. It’s the same phoneme as the r in the Spanish pero.
You know there are people who actually study this stuff, and observe what we think we hear is often wrong because we are influenced by the spelling of words. In words like sing, there are neither an /n/ nor a /g/.
OK, moving on to other annoying trendy things in society. What’s with the duck-face pictures? 😛
In today’s Strib: To some women, ‘vocal fry’ is sizzling