Airhead. Bubblehead. Valley Girl.
These labels are reserved for women and girls who talk as if they didn't have a cell in their brains. But linguists are now saying that these very women and girls are actually linguistic "pioneers" responsible for moving our language forward (or, like, somewhere).
Observing girls age 18-25 from Long Island, and calling them "the petri dish of girl culture" researchers identified a guttural utterance they named a "vocal fry." This sound is "a raspy or croaking sound injected (usually) at the end of a sentence."
A vocal fry is apparently that last syllable drawn out in a very annoying way. The fry may sound stupid to the uninitiated, but the girls are communicating something with each other, the linguists claim, and it has to do with building relationships in their peer group (while it also has something to do with stopping the building of relationships with everyone else).
Apparently, the girl petri dish is also responsible for the current the word "like" inserted into every single freakin' sentence of a teenage girl, and how that word has leaked into the sentences of perfectly educated non-bubblehead adult people. For linguists, this means something too, but like what?
It might actually mean that we are listening to these females talk, and imitating them. More likely, they are making their own dialect, which human groups always do to become cohesive. Because we, like, want to be so much like each other.
