What is it with the vocal fry!! Just stop!!

[usedcars11]

I manage a girl less than half my age and she is driving me insane.

She has this low, croaky vocal fry voice where she drawwwwwssss ouuuut every syllable, It must hurt her throat to talk like it!.

She also sniffs constantly, I sit right next to her and have thought about offering a tissue but I dont want to offend her.

On the other hand she is genuinely driving me insane with the dopey, drawling voice and the sniffing.

Is it ok to speak to her about it? I suspect the sniffing I can address but I dont feel I can ask her to just bloody speak properly!

ARGHH

Haha @EatBeautiful I once considered changing my user name to RoryStewartsVocalFry 😂

Screaming isn't always aggression; it can be excitement, alarm, an affectation.
Annoying, as is vocal fry.
We were mentioning places other than work.

The correct solution is to mock and ridicule people like that. You'd be doing them a favor. That's how they'll learn what behavior is annoying to others, but unfortunately that response is frowned-upon these days, so I guess we have to put up with it.

Your colleague sounds irritating but I doubt that she is 'a girl', unless your workplace has some very unusual employment practices.

There's a brilliant podcast called Love Trapped about a woman who tries to trap men through pregnancy and her mother who is complicit in her crimes. Anyway, they BOTH have the worst vocal fry I have ever heard and although the topic of the podcast was excellent it was a hard listen due to annoying, growly drawl. Many women at work adopt it and now say 'thaaank yowwww'. I just wince to their faces.

There a young woman in my office who speaks like this, but with added posh accent and it drives me mad. I can’t remember whether it was the video linked earlier or somewhere else, but I heard it described as sounding like your batteries are running out and that’sty exactly it. She speaks quite differently on calls, much more animated, but the rest of the time it’s this tedious breathy drawl and it’s grating.

I wonder if it's the vapes?

Hate it too OP.

So affected, sounds dumb and self important.

should have rtft 😂

🤣🤣🤣

Funny because at the very moment I’m reading this thread, BBC News in the background is having a meltdown and making a noise that sounds like a very drawn out vocal fry. I’ve had to turn over.

I made a post a while back about vocal fry and how much I can’t bear it and so many more people do it. It’s ruining my favourite lazy hobby of doomscrolling instagram because of the amount of people who have VF. I do have misophonia so sounds in general are an issue but this one is major.

Please make it stop.

Both the sniffing and voice would drive me mad😩

In case anyone wants to learn vocal fry 😆

type vocal fry on Google and click videos, I hadn’t a clue either!

It is an incredibly annoying affectation. A pleasant speaking voice is a great asset.

They did an episode on the this American Life radio programme/podcast on this 10+ years ago when listeners (men) started to complain that younger female reporters were doing it. And they did, and it is annoying.

But, spoiler alert, the punchline is that the much older, male host of the show was doing it the whole segment, as he does every show (and he's aware of it) and no one said a thing about his voice being annoying.

So yes it's annoying and also women tend to get a harder time for doing it.

Personally, it would distract me at work and I'd get annoyed if I had to hear an exaggerated version all day.

www.thisamericanlife.org/545/if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-say-it-in-all-caps/act-two-2

I don’t know about vocal fry but sometimes autistic people can speak in an accent different from their expected regional one and sometimes American sounding. There was a girl at dd’s school like this and it is a thing. She may well just be a twat with affectations but maybe thinking there could possibly be another reason for it will help you feel less irritated?

I feel your pain OP. I manage a team and we have one lady who does this loud, obnoxious, throat clearing cough (just one cough) roughly every 30 minutes. All day. For 10 hours a day. She never covers her mouth so if you are in her radar you get a blast.

Ive asked her gently if she is unwell, or if there is anything that affects her that we can do to help and she claims its dust. We have a cleaner come in every day and clean the office (hoover, wipe down desks, empty bins) so our office is not dusty. No one else is having any dust related issues.

She is not British and smokes 20 a day of some imported looking cigarettes that she says she gets cheap in bulk 'from a mate back home' which I highly suspect is causing the cough but I cant say that out loud, only on MN.

I was following a lady on Tiktok around the time of the Christa Pike execution that was covering it, and every sentence started high pitched and ended in a very low tone. At the end of every sentence she would put her hand up in a 'stop' gesture.

It drove me fucking nuts to watch, her content was very good but I just couldn't stand watching a video for more than 30 seconds. She sounded just like that bored out of her mind air hostess on Ryanair that has been told to read out the safety information and really doesn't fucking want to.

It is really annoying but as her manager I am not sure you can call it out, unless it is genuinely difficult to hear her on calls or it affects her work somehow. She may not even realise she is doing it.

My own manager does it occasionally and as soon as he starts I completely lose track of what he is saying because I am so busy being irritated. I will turn off podcasts or TV programmes if there is too much vocal fry.

Is this all just TikTok culture copycat speech? Why do some women speak in such an affected manner? It does not make them appear more confident or attractive in case thats the desired effect. It sounds kind of dismissive and bored.

Sounds like an American woman’s voice . I’ve never understood how it’s so deep and croaky, scratchy .

Can you tell her that some customers have commented that they can't hear her very well and she needs not to make her voice so low?

I think I might have come across the same one, or if not it was one who had a very annoying similar habit. It made me think of a newsreader but it was such a forced, unnatural way of speaking and was so annoying I couldn't make it through a single video.

Unless you are a Mongolian throat singer I think the men and women who adopt this affectation sound as thick as two short planks