Front Porch: No longer lone wolf on vocal fry

Vindication!

How wonderful to discover that I am not a lone crazy lady barking at the moon. I learned that I’m not all by myself out there – by reading the comics in the newspaper.

I started out this past Sunday morning, as I start most mornings, reading The Spokesman-Review. It’s an early morning ritual of several decades’ standing that is as much a part of launching my day as is brushing my teeth and making my bed.

I have long believed – and tell everyone I know – that, wherever you live, if you value good reporting and being informed about your local community, you need to subscribe to your local paper. If you don’t like a story or disagree with an editorial opinion, fine. I’m often in that position myself. Write a letter to the editor. Engage. It’s your community, your newspaper.

So there I was, reading away, when I turned to the comics. And, yes, I read most of them. The “funnies” – not all of which are actually ho-ho funny – provide social commentary and hold a mirror up to our foibles, often wrapped in a smile and usually illuminating. If you want to see what life is like with a teenager, read “Zits.” Middle-class family life, try “For Better Or For Worse.” And, I swear, I wonder when the creators of “Pickles” surreptitiously hid cameras in my house in order to spy on our lives as older Americans – and put it in the comic strip.

This past Sunday, it was “Doonesbury” that provided me the vindication I didn’t know would ever come. As most people know, “Doonesbury” is an often-controversial strip that has been penned by Garry Trudeau, following since 1970 (with a liberal bent) the lives of Vietnam-era veterans, college students and counter culture individuals (and now, their descendants), often offering humorous and biting commentary on politics and society, even mixing in real people (Donald Trump most recently) in plotlines.

This past Sunday “Doonesbury” character Mike Doonesbury expressed his dismay at hearing younger journalists speak in creaky voices that make them sound like they’re 80-plus years old. In his disgust, he snaps off his radio. His media-savvy daughter Alex notes that he’s complaining once again about vocal fry.

“Dad, do you know how long you’ve been complaining about that? And before fry, it was upspeak.”

YES!

I’m with you, Brother Mike, and I, too, have muted the TV during a news show when the fry makes my temples throb. I’ve written in this column – too often, I fear – about both vocal fry and upspeak, those artificial and affected speech patterns that are so pretentious I have a visceral reaction to them. Yes, yes, I know, I need to get a life.

Sure, there are others who have taken note, even a communication disorders professor I know who declares vocal fry to be potentially harmful to vocal chords, but I’ve never seen any kind of national recognition of this coarsening of speech or large scale reaction to it. Until my hero Garry Trudeau put it out there for a national audience on Sunday, that is.

This Sunday’s observations and commentary are certainly of much less significance and weight than what he usually tackles – having waded into so many timely, hot-potato and sacred-cow issues over the decades, from abortion to xenophobia, causing national outrage in so doing. But that Trudeau would decry vocal fry and upspeak in his strip at all – ah, joy.

It’s suddenly not so lonely out there at moonrise.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by e-mail at upwindsailor@comcast.net.