I know ... I know ... I am a curmudgeon. But I just watched an English professor from Yale discussing its curriculum choices there and she spoke in what is increasingly infecting the women of this nation ... and an occasional pajama boy (Tucker Carlson comes to mind) ... and that is "valley talk." This is where, when speaking a declarative sentence, the speaker emphasizes the last syllable of the last word in each sentence as though she/he is unsure of the point being made ... and turns everything into a half-question. This zika-like plague is now seen on cable TV where more of the female "pundits" under the age of 40 are clearly smitten with this guttural way of communicating. They think it is eliciting sympathy for their viewpoint. To me, it does just the opposite.
This verbal tic apparently started years ago with the teeny-bopper girls in the San Fernando Valley outside of Los Angeles and traveled east for whatever reason ... perhaps because we have a national inferiority complex. But, when it reaches into the ivied halls of Yale and into its English department no less, we know that our spoken language is slip-sliding away. I am not a linguist but I do understand how spoken language patterns take hold ... as, when the king of Spain had a lisp, it then became fashionable for everyone to lisp (still persists to this day). But why gum-chewing valley girls? Why are they to be emulated?
(If I were speaking this last sentence my voice would go up on the "ed.")
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