Creaky voice

[ronbutters at AOL.COM]

Just spent dinner listening to a rich white guy from New York, Duke graduate, about 30, constant creaker. His wife did not creak at all. His creak seemed to reinforce a personality that suggests wealth, power, and self-conscious superiority and coolness. Spent most of the time describing expensive parties and weddings he and she had been to lately.

Sent from my iPad

On Jan 1, 2011, at 1:09 PM, David Bowie <db.list at PMPKN.NET> wrote:

> From:    Ronald Butters<ronbutters at AOL.COM>
>
>> If you listen closely, you will note that creaking is a common
>> phenomenon among men, women, teenage boys, and even small parrots.
>
> As a professional who regularly does acoustic analysis i might shouldn't
> admit this, but i've just been glossing past the term "creaky voice" for
> years now without ever caring to learn what it actually meanshat is, i
> could have given you a technical definition in terms of what the vocal
> tract is doing, but i didn't have a connection in my head between that
> and the sound of it.
>
> So this thread got me to finally make that connection, and so i googled
> lots of stuff on creaky voice, only to find lots and lots of people who
> absolutely hate it. Me, though? I find it utterly unremarkable (in the
> social senserofessionally, it'd be interesting to look into). I just
> thought that's the way people sound when they talk.
>
> (Now i have to figure out if i have creaky voice or not. Students
> regularly say that i have a "soothing" voice, and given the way non-fans
> of creaky voice characterize it, soothing may be the conceptual opposite.)
>
> One thing i noticed in my searching, by the way, is that a lot of people
> who loathe creaky voice and were kind enough to provide YouTube clips to
> show what they meant seemed to react most strongly not to creaky voice
> alone, but rather to creaky voice plus a high degree of nasality.
>
> <snip>
>
> --
> Very truly yours,
> David Bowie
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org