When bacon fries, it makes a crackling, bubbling, splashy sound and smells delicious.

When young women fry their voices, they make a grinding sound in the back of their throats, and regardless of how they smell, they are undermining their stature and impact by doing so. 

I am going to call the Center for Disease Control to announce that I have detected a dangerous new epidemic of The Vocal Fry. (Please see the bottom of this posting for a definition of Vocal Fry.)

It has mostly infected young women, and it makes them sound as if they’ve run out of air, and are generating their voices by grinding their vocal chords together.

It manifests itself mostly at the ends of sentences. To me, it makes them sound tense, cerebral, and unappealing. I do not want to listen to them speak about anything.

No doubt this is a failing on my part, but I am confessing now, in public, that The Vocal Fry is like fingernails on a blackboard to me.

I think it’s mostly educated young women, maybe even educated young women from a certain background that have developed this as a fashionable way to talk.

I am going to capture recordings of it and put them up here on the blog, or on my other blogs at www.simswyeth.com/blog or at executivespeechcoachny.com

The human voice must stand guard over the content of a spoken message, or the content will evaporate, no matter how precious it was in itself.

The Vocal Fry has to go.

Definition:The vocal fry register (also known as pulse register, laryngealisation, pulse phonation, creak, glottal fry, glottal rattle, glottal scrape or strohbass), is the lowest vocal register and is produced through a loose glottal closure which will permit air to bubble through slowly with a popping or rattling sound of a very low frequency.