Uptalk
Chalupas Cowen interviews Ben Sasse. I had no clue who this Sasse guy was, but apparently he's a poster child of a well-adjusted American conservative. The uber cuck. Now this is a bit unfair. The guy does seem smart. And he seems like a good person. A healthy, down to earth family man. He's even written a book about education which isn't half bad.
The guy just seems like a very productive person. A german-descendend guy from Nebraska, when he commits to a job he does it well. Extremely well. And now his job is to be a Republican senator. To be a cuck. So he's a professional cuck. An extremely productive cuck. It's not his fault really, it's just the world we live in. If he had lived in Germany in the 1930s he would have been an extremely productive Gestapo commander. If he had been an Englishman in the 19th century he would have been an extremely efficient colonial conqueror. Alas, he's a Nebraskan in the current year. So he went to Harvard, then was a university manager, and now he's a proffessional Senate cuck.
By the way I wonder what it takes for a white evangelical kid from the Midwest to get into Harvard. Maybe things have changed since this guy's time. But the few non-connected white Christians who get into Harvard must be *extremely* tightly screened.
This post isn't about Ben Sasse himself; there's little I can say about him. I'm not an ornitologist. But I am a linguist. So I can talk about his way of speech. Now many of you might have heard of "uptalk". Most Americans don't notice it, the way fish don't know what water is. But for foreign learners of English, uptalk is just weird. They don't teach uptalk in English classes. I should talk about language teaching some other day, it's really broken. The only way to actually learn something is if you have the power to notice things by yourself. But that applies to most education. Anyway, I digress.
Uptalk is the relatively recent (last 25 years or so) trend of mainstream American speech, where the rising tone typical of question clauses gets applied to words in the middle of a declarative sentence.
I like traveling to foreign countries? Because I think that the culture? And the things you see? Are fascinating and fullfill me as a person?
The whole things doesn't make a lot of sense. But as always, there's two dimensions to language. There's language as a set of rules, which are made clear by prescriptive analysis. And then is what people actually do with the rules, i.e. change them all the time, and that's descriptive analysis. Uptalk started apparently with teenage girls in California. But now it's freaking everywhere. And you have a 45 year old man, a US Senator with 3 children, using uptalk 5 times per sentence. It's infuriating. But let's not have value judgment stop us from doing a good analysis.
Why do people do uptalk? We can define uptalk as the transfer of question marks into non-questions. Now why would people do that? There's a good thing that questions and non-questions are distinct in speech. But the common way of explaining questions vs. non-questions is, as tends to happen with all Western style social science, heavily restricted by a logical analysis of how language works. Questions don't only demand information. They're also a way of calling attention. Of showing epistemic humility. Or of being a pussy who doesn't stand by his opinion.
A statement implies certainty. I like traveling. Yes I do. That's my prerrogative. And now I let it known. That's how it used to work. But not anymore. Now every statement is suspect of fascism. Being too sure of yourself is toxic masculinity. Assuming that people talk to you because they want to know something about you is mansplaining. The correct way of having a conversation is to make it everything into a question. The implication is "I'm not very sure about this, if you think I'm wrong or a fascist or I'm guilty of having a penis please forgive me, I'll change my opinion sooner than you can say the word "cuck"".
... or that's what Roissy would write. Well, actually that's pretty much exactly what Roissy wrote some time ago. I wrote the above before checking that out. The thing with language though is that one shouldn't read too much into it. At the end of the day, language is just a behavioral habit. People don't "generate" language according to some calculated inputs. I'm quite sure Senator Sasse isn't generating uptalk because he's a passive-aggressive cuck who actually wants to coerce your agreement after each freaking clause. He's just doing what everybody else in his milieu does; and him being a *very* well-adjusted religious German who does what his peers expecting him to do, he got a habit of uptalk.
Which is interesting in its own way: language is *the* window into human behavior, because it follows the same rules as every other behavior does, but it's orders of magnitude more frequent and easy to analyze. And a good rule that language analysis gives us, is that if you want to find the cause of some behavior, you shouldn't look at its present shape. The present shape is just a function of habit and people copying each other, especially higher status people. The best way of achieving some explanatory power is to loo at the evolutionary process by which a habit became common. In genetics I think they call that "achieve fixation".
In evolutionary terms, Uptalk started with teenage girls, and indeed it was an effect of modern Californian teenage girl society, which is a good approximation to a Hobbesian state of nature of all against all, where you must police your every single act, lest the sisterhood comes crashing down on you and throws you and your status into some ghetto in Oakland. So that's how teenage girls evolved passive-aggresiveness and high-frequence semi-questions as self-defence. The interesting thing is why that spread out of teenage girl life into wider society. This implies there's something about modern society which is similar to teenage girl total status war.
Uptalk can also be seen as the fusion of the colloquial tags "like...", "you know?" into the actual word itself. "Like" and "you know" are also a ways of holding plausible deniability about one's statement. You aren't just asserting something. You aren't really like, sure, you know, so you hold plausible deniablity lest your interlocutor be short of status in that particular moment and she uses the chance to throw you under the bus. Again, one way of putting this is epistemic humility. Another way of putting this is a complete breakdown of social trust so that conversation is pretty much... impossible?
Steve Sailer often says that it's a good thing we got this Tower of Babel thing; as different languages make the transfer of bad ideas extremely easy, and different languages act as a good barrier. Uptalk makes an excellent example of this. In a few decades it has conquered the whole US, and it's fast making inroads into Britain; while I've never seen anything like it in any other language. Parochialsm has its own problems, but avoiding Uptalk and other progressive memes makes it worth it.
Do check out the whole podcast. Not that the content itself is interesting; that would be controversial and problematic. Interestingly Tyler Cowen has its own slightly milder version of uptalk, but he uses it in almost every single end of clause. This follows Cowen's own style: he follows the mainstream, he's a well behaved true-believer; but he does it his own way; lest the wind changes some other way, then he can claim that he was always for war against Eastasia. Of course he was.
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[…] Uptalk […]
It comes from Eastern European Yiddish. They never state something definitely, everything is conditional and unclear, one is forced to deduce and work out what the other person meant. It is the language of the powerless talking to capricious, hostile officials.
And here I wanted to avoid blaming the Jews for once.
The quasi-interrogative tone is a defensive mechanism in uncertain situation, when there is a probability to be mis-interpreted as insulting or offensive. Today's social environment is toxic and malignant, a senator may be forced to resign for telling a joke and a President of Harvard for stating an obvious but unacceptable fact of life. Just as feudal Japan developed a style to address and talk to high ranking persons (and avoid being beheaded), current environment forces people to find ways to address a potentially fatal audience (without risking being accused of racism or whatever). BTW, did you notice how the speech of Catholic and Chinese hierarchs ooze saccharine benevolence?
Indeed. The funny thing is that any defense mechanism doesn't work for much long once everybody adopts it. It's not like saying "men might have higher math aptitude" in uptalk won't get you tarred and feathered. So you get an inflationary spiral of defense mechanisms because the underlying issue, i.e. the toxic environment, is still there. Japanese or Korean honorifics are a good example of that. It's insanely complex and yet people still get in trouble for amazingly minute perceived breaches of etiquette.
Almost certainly true to a point, but I suspect that it has more to do with peer status amongst yids. As Spandrell pointed out, it's a defense against a status sneak attack, which is a very common yeshiva occurrence.
This is very good, I think about it all the time and have seen its total evolution during my life. The 'like' and 'you know' (often "I mean, like, you know" I have heard Cambridge lesbian professors use when lecturing on Baroque painting) precede the uptalk by a decade or more, and they have never gone out of fashion with teens, who use it more than ever. Just like 'cool', although we all still accept that because perfect. The 'like' is even chronicled by Gore Vidal in the mid-60s, and that one in particular is often every 5 words or so by now. Years ago, I did the opened-out version--stating something, and then saying 'isn't it' or 'don't you think so?' That had to be severely curtailed, but I never could do the uptalk with any frequency, so am often considered disagreeable. In the 90s, it was still known to be ValleyGirlSpeak (so it's a product of L.A.), but even that's forgotten now that it's so ubiquitous and mindless. Trump uses a fair amount of it, though not nearly always, and at least never with a lisp.
[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]
Alternative hypothesis. The vocal fry your are describing also serves a secondary feature among young women as a class marker. It's usage is by primarily upper middle class and aspirational $5 frozen latte sipping women as a non visual cue to screen out proles. Sasse could have adopted it for similar reasons. That or he maybe a faggot. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Cheap signals don't work. There's nothing stopping a prole from talking that way. And the point here is that this guy is no faggot. He has a pretty wife and 3 children. How many have you got?
lol don't take it so literally
Accents are not cheap signals, it is very easy to pick fakers. Learning an accent is a passive process you have little control over. You get your accent from the people you interact with and you only get one. What we hear in that audio is that Ben Sasse has an accent with uptalk as the most distinctive component. But uptalk but it is certainly not the only component of his accent. What Ben Sasse signals when speaking that ways is one hand the things you describe in your post, but on the other hand -- and probably more importantly -- that his social circle is composed mainly of people speaking that way. People familiar with that social circle are thus informed that he is a member of that social circle.
Well I'm personally very good at picking up accents, and uptalk is really easy to fake.
Vocal fry is distinct from up-talk, though I'd image their distributions overlap a fair bit.
I don't know who invented uptalk but it's much more prevalent in Australia.
So that is where that shit comes from? I have always hated the way that *American* talked. The above poster already mentioned it, but the Australians talk like that. Apparently, it is because they were a bunch of servile convicts.
Spandrell I am sure you've read Puzo's The Godfather. So Don Corleone is the literal opposite of the submissive type here and yet he loves talking in questions. "What did I do that you do not respect me? Why don't you want to be my friend?" This can easily be a way to show dominance. We typically do that with kids. "Will you just look at yourself? Aren't you ashamed of yourself? You get a new dress and five minutes later you pour chocolate milk all over it? Is it the proper way to treat new clothes? This is how you thank your parents for buying you nice new clothes? Is this what a good girl does?" All questions, yet a fairly thorough tongue-lashing delivered from an unmistakebly dominant position, one would never do this with a boss. BTW. How comes different languages have similar sounding local accents, I mean, sounds a lot like similar forces shaping them? Try to compare Birmingham or Australian English with Vienna or maybe Bavaria German. Both are the opposite as the sound of uptalk. Very deep sounding, a guttural, talking from the stomach (or cellar) sound. I am no linguist so probably I am getting it completely wrong, but I tend to associate these lower pitched dialects with urban factory workers and higher pitched dialects with mountain / highlands people (Scotland, Tirol.) For an another ridiculous attempt of mine to dabble in the trade of the linguists, see: https://dividuals.wordpress.com/2015/10/15/american-talk-and-woman-talk/
Dividualist--my understanding is that uptalk is not talking in questions, which are themselves full sentences. It's more a declarative sentence spoken like a question, and sounding incomplete or even like dropping off mid-sentence, with the person spoken-to sometimes just nodding instead of saying anything. I'm sure Spandrell will know, though? Uptalk in this American form is after The Godfather. Hurtel is right that many Americans don't like it, and you'd never hear Charlie Rose, for example, using it.
Yes, you're quite right. It's not about asking questions, it's about using question tones with declarative clauses. In fact you'll notice how Corleone (and other badasses ) asks questions in a declarative tone.
I've found myself trailing off mid sentence when I start airing an idea that's inappropriate. Those who see can follow the thread, those who cannot do not attempt to burn me as a heretic. The uptalk strikes me as the instinctual version of this, as applied by NPCs.
Many Americans can identify uptalk, don't like it much, and it is especially questionable in a guy. I am trying to learn Japanese right now, and I want to avoid saying things in a feminine way, just like I don't want to uptalk in English. By the way, about half the time I think I am wasting my time, but then this phrase popped up in my head- that I have to waste time, in the target language. It's the only way to notice anything.
Don't over do manliness in Japanese, actual speech isn't as differentiated as most fiction would have it.
Too bad. From watching Japanese language stuff with subtitles always loved the sound of barking orders in that super gravelly samurai accent or the almost drunkenly slurred gangster talk.
Good thing about tonal languages is that they don't have such problems. Which brings me to the question: is there any reason why questions have a rising intonation (corresponding to the 2nd tone in Mandarin) in most of the world's languages?
My mother's dialect has a falling tone for questions, fwiw.
In English, yes/no questions are asked ending with a rising tone, and others are ended with a falling tone. In all languages, falling tone indicates confidence, certainty, tranquillity, so I presume your Mother must be high class. Not like we neurotics.
She isn't high class, and I'm not talking about her personal speech, but about a dialect with a million speakers. A good rule of thumb is to not read too much into language features. The world is big.
"Uptalk" is to rhetoric what a key change is to music. It builds tension, but tension needs resolution. Excessive or improper usage just makes the speaker sound hysterical.
I certainly notice uptalk. Dislike it much. That, and "liking" (as I call the abundant use of "like" as a stall-word and softener), both make me crazy. I amuse myself, in the company of people who are liking overmuch, by interrupting them to ask "was it actually X, or was it just like X?" And, "OK, how it was like X?" Doing this is fun because it makes the target highly self-conscious, and of course they use "like" unconsciously, so they cannot easily stop doing so, and will almost always do it again, often in the next sentence. "Like" is also used as a marker of paraphrase-or-quote, which is a useful innovation (the language nazi grudgingly admits) but also easily abused. I ask questions about that, too: "Did he say X, or is was he just like that?"
Why not show some audio examples of Normal Talk and Up Talk. I have NO ability to learn to play music or learn a second language and now I learn I can't discern the Up Talk in the interview. To me Sasse sounds just as another politician: slippery, smarmy, and dodgy. I could see him smiling all through the interview, in my mind's eye, like a cheap whore. Dan Kurt
Uptalking example [Warning, if you have any dogs nearby, be sure to cover their sensitive ears before playing]: tinyurl.com/ydyszlyd
You're probably better off that way.
Since one prefers not to annoy listeners unintentionally, I am glad to learn that listeners do not like uptalk. Actually, I had thought that you were misinformed, but searching old Youtube clips of good speakers only confirms your assertion. For example, here are a good U.S. speaker and a good English speaker together in or about the late 1930s: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBJGHvt7I3c&w=560&h=315\] Regarding Ben Sasse: If he had lived in Germany in the 1930s he would have been an extremely productive Gestapo commander. If he had been an Englishman in the 19th century he would have been an extremely efficient colonial conqueror. Fascinating.
My understanding of uptalk was that it was adopted from non-native English speakers who regularly use it in their native tongues (because that's just how the language is), transferring it over to their English accents. And then native American English speakers just started doing it for the hell of it, maybe for the reasons you're suggesting. I also am not sure if it's possible to pinpoint one language in particular as the source - I've noticed that Chicano English dialect does this a lot, and I have no idea why, since I don't hear it in Spanish (are they all just copying it from valley girls? Is there something in the syntactic structure of Spanish that translates oddly to English, causing uptalk to seem like a more natural cadence?) Also, for the person who's suggesting it's Yiddish, I actually do know a Russian Jew who spent some time in Israel (knows Russian, Hebrew, and English is his third language), and he uptalks excessively. So I dunno what that means, but it's interesting. Does anyone know what the current scholarship says? This is one of those topics where I suspect that hardly any two linguists agree.
In my experience, uptalk is HUGE in Israel. I live in Canada and know many Russians from Israel, and they all uptalk, but only when asking questions. It seems to be the intonational pattern for Israelis when they ask questions, or at least Russian-Israelis. It's funny because the intonation makes every question they ask seem like they are asking "don't you" rather than "do you?" For example, if they ask "do you like cheese?" the uptalky intonation makes it sound like they are really asking "you like cheese, don't you?", like they assumed something and they just need you to confirm it. It doesn't sound like an open-ended question. It sounds like they are answering the question for you, but just need you to confirm the answer. The intonation makes it seem like you've talked about it before, and they are just re-confirming something they already know (or assumed). It's hard to explain perfectly, but I think you know what I mean
The really interesting q., from my point of view, is how long people uptalk before they stop thinking about the rising intonation as an uncertainty-marker and starting thinking of it as having a syntactic function. The rising intonation per phrase is, for example, a feature of standard French and so far as I know they never interpret as having any expressive purpose - it's purely to mark syntactic relations within each sentence. It seems to take 2-3 years of living in Los Angeles for adult men to get the same effect.
I'm not quite seeing the syntactic function here. Seems just part of the accent.
Same function as in French. Breaks sentences in phrases.
Yeah but not reliably at all. If it marks some phrases but not others then it's not a marker, it's doing something else, and just happens to be placed at the end of a phrase.
Yes, that's what I hear too, and it does not always break sentences into phrases, but sometimes just ends 'up' at the end of short sentences, often sped up and with a million spontaneously improvised variations according to the bimbo using it: An attempt to force agreement with some kind of tacky guile, whatever the user is most convinced will keep the camera on him (Rose's guests do sometimes talk the entire time in uptalk), so goes 'up' whenever there is a felt need for the cute, winsome command. "It seems to take 2-3 years of living in Los Angeles for adult men to get the same effect." I don't get this at all. People in Los Angeles do not use uptalk with any more regularity than people in other places. That it's associated with teen girls in the San Fernando Valley is irrelevant; it's a big city where I've spent a lot of time. It's not some syndrome (you even make it seem like a learned skill) that an 'adult man' would get infected with by living in L.A. long enough to be a 'native', or just 'fairy', you may mean. You write it as if it would be desirable somehow for them to cultivate this, whereas the power brokers of Los Angeles (and the majority below them) would no more talk like that than Don Corleone. It appears more frequently, perhaps, in the Industry people there, though, it's true--film nerds, etc.
You need to reply to me if you want me to see the comment! :) People in LA definitely use uptalk more than people in other places. Power brokers in LA definitely use uptalk more than power brokers elsewhere. Maybe 20-30 years ago it was limited to the Valley but that is strictly genealogy. Possibly you've spent so much time in LA that it sounds normal to you and you can only hear it in its most exaggerated teen-girl form? idk. Or (given the way you talk about "the Industry") maybe you spend your time in LA embedded in some specific sector (ummm... aerospace?) which defines itself in opposition to the main centers of power in LA. >you even make it seem like a learned skill It's a dialect-feature; yes, it's learned, in the same way that the tic of saying "the 405" instead of just "405" is learned
Well, maybe you have more exposure to LA than I do, maybe not. If not, pay close attention the next time you're around them. Imho you will find the uptalk *most striking* on certain sentences where the intonation seems to have a semantic function (i.e., in standard English, rising intonation on that sentence could plausibly be used to indicate a question, uncertainty, desire for assent) but if you listen carefully you'll note the presence of rising intonation *on every phrase*, including on segments where it's subphonemic to the extent that you (the listener) normally wouldn't notice the difference because there is no distinction based on rising intonation a standard speaker could possibly make there.
Well, some of that is very interesting. It's definitely a silly place in a lot of ways, although I like it a lot. Have been in most of it because spectacular in a weird way and sense of hugeness. It's possible I haven't listened closely enough, but I definitely didn't notice that much more of it than here in NYC in 13 trips. Speaking of 'the', I've always found it too-campy the way 'those in the know' know to say 'The Sunset Strip' instead of 'Sunset Strip', like those with 'the cooties.' The old 'culture competition' with New York was funny too, because although there is quality at the Music Center and Disney Concert Hall, the quantity of great musicians of all kinds (not to mention the tiny ballet company, which is good even so) is about 5% of what New York's is. There's enough of it, though, that's it's very relaxing to be there. I had also been 'replying' to Spandrell, I heard it more like him.
Can confirm that uptalk is relatively common among film people. Four years in film school, two years in the industry, I heard it from about half the men, typically among younger interns and assistants like myself. Not as common among interns and assistants from the Midwest. btw, L.A. is far superior to NYC. You can keep your music and food. I'll take the beaches, the mountains, and the 330 days of sunshine. More on topic: "like" and "you know" emerged among cool daddy-o rockers and Beat poets in the 1950's, not among San Fernando girls in the 1980s. Scroll to the middle of this old academic post of mine, and there are some early examples: https://technaverbascripta.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/a-possible-explanation-for-the-emergence-of-quotative-like-in-american-english/ Of course, like Bob Dylan, cool daddy-o rock-n-roll kids in the 1950s were all passive-aggressive and secretly status-conscious, so Spandrell's excellent analysis still stands.
Good piece. I don't know when I first heard forms of 'like', but the ones you have at the originary moment, as it were, are 'Like, wow', and the Previn "Like Love" album, predate the endless barrage of "I was like" and "she was like", don't they? I'm not sure. I think the 'was like' I started hearing later and it was much more manic, also "and I'm like, NOOOOO..." and such dizzy things. John Cleese did a great number with "He was like" and "I'm like" sometime in the 80s. I just saw from wiki that Valley Girls were originally upper-middle-class. Wouldn't have thought that, but there are some affluent parts. Never thought to spend time there. True about the beaches like Hermosa and Trancas, though.
True, what a linguist might call quotative like ("I'm like NOOO") wasn't in full effect until the 1970s and 80s, but it's semantically similar to the earlier "like wow" examples. The first line in
comes damn close. Upper middle class is hard to define in Southern California. Due to the costs of living, a family earning $100k in San Fernando Valley would probably not live a life recognizably "upper middle class" anywhere else in the nation, even if their income suggests they're in that socio-economic bracket. Then again, there are some very nice areas in Encino, Tarzana, and a few other Valley cities. You thought correctly to not spend time in the Valley, though. Not much of interest there, just as there isn't much of interest in the Inland Empire (which at least has Mt. Baldy).
What about Japanese? I find uptalk to be similar to one of the most notable features of Japanese, namely, inability to state things directly. They are too afraid to say something inappropriate, to hurt someone even the slightest bit.
Yeah, that's accurate. There's about a dozen of question-derived constructions to imply lack of certainty, and they're used pervasively. What they don't do is rising tones though.
Ah, I've found another possible source of the disease. Japanese teachers use uptalk to emphasize parts of sentences. As in 本職の詩人ともなれば ↑、いつ↑どんな注文があるか、わからないから↑、常に詩材の準備を↑して置くのである。 Wouldn't be surprised if US teachers and mothers do the same to their kids. Also, the comment about passiveness of accent acquisition is right. Way too right. Most of my conversations in English during last couple of months have been with a man with a very faggish intonation. This intonation has stuck in my head, and now I hear fagginess when I think in English. I am looking for speeches in English and Japanese with great and manly tone, pronunciation and content. Can you suggest something?
That's a weird example sentence. Can't really say about Japanese; never really heard a manly speech. In English I'm fond of Enoch Powell. Lee Kuan Yew also had a great tone, if a weird accent.
I only ever learned rudimentary snippets of Japanese but I seem to remember statements like 'chooto desu' meant 'a little inconvenient' or in other words, 'definitely not.'
After a decent number of conversations with both Japanese men and women, I think I can say that the men are still more polite than the women, and more sincerely so.
After a decent number of conversations with both Japanese men and women, I think I can say that the men are still more polite than the women, and more sincerely so.
Extremely well put.
Off topic, but Spandrell, I'm curious to hear your observations on Tokyo's recent elections.
35% turnout, the media full retard against Abe. Koike is a sneaky little bitch. And Abe will have to do something about the media sooner rather than later.
Have you seen this? Progressives are losing their minds over it. https://twitter.com/tanutinn/status/881510647019692033
lol. It's quite obvious Koike has jo ideology besides what's expedient for her. And liberalism isn't exactly popular these days.
それはどういう意味ですか？