h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Is this a new thing, or was it always there and I'm just noticing it more because it drives me nuts?

Using 'thuh' (or 'tha') before a word beginning with a vowel, instead of 'thee'. Try it, out loud. How would you say 'the other one', 'the orange' or 'the evening'?

Here's a radio story that's peppered with it throughout http://www.npr.org/2016/01/03/461795258/arts-capsule-to-hitch-a-ride-to-the-moon-on-carnegie-mellon-s-rover 'Thuh ark', 'thuh artist', 'thuh other'.

I've just heard "state of thuh art"

It's always been there, or here at least.

http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/the#Pronunciation

Same here. I rarely hear "thee" instead of "thuh" (at least amongst people sharing my accent) unless someone is trying to be either fancy or pretentious. Or at least, not so I've noticed. Now I'll have to listen more closely *pointedly doesn't add the smiley that really really belongs here, since this is a Gosho journal *

I probably say it all day long. I even remember wondering as a kid why the same word (and right there I even did it in my head!) spelled the same way meaning the same thing was pronounced two different ways. I've always treated them as interchangeable and never paid it any mind.

Now, of course, I'll be noticing it everywhere. (Kind of like that piece on Vocal Fry I heard on NPR over the weekend, now I notice it everywhere too!)

I think vocal fry has always been there, it just didn't have a name. I remember hearing that story earlier in the year and then reading some things online after. There was a lot of backlash over it as it seemed to associate it more with women's voices and as a recent trend when there really isn't any reason or evidence that it occurs more recently or with more female voices. (This is assuming you just heard the same story I heard and not a completely different story.)



I think NPR was rerunning a lot of their stories over the New Years weekend. I also heard a story I was quite interested in regarding a possible new tattoo removal cream that will be very effective, painless and cheap called Bisphosphonate Liposomal Tattoo Removal (BLTR). After hearing about it again, I looked it up on the internet as soon as I could only to find no news since last February when the story first ran. It's still apparently in the testing phase and isn't yet available.

I want to remove and replace my 42 tattoo that I ruined by trying to get an h2g2 logo added to it. The "artist" I chose was completely inept and now I'm left with something completely illegible, like a "captcha".



I vaguely remember being introduced to the "schwa" sound with "the" as an example when I was in elementary school.

I believe that vocal fry did have a name, but only among phoneticians... phoneticists? Must be phoneticians because the spellchecker isn't flagging that as a typo. People who study phonetics. It's called creak. Was the story you both heard a Fresh Air broadcast? I listened to that one when it was broadcast. I didn't go all the way to the end because I got so frustrated with them concentrating on feminist/discrimination aspect of the whole thing (which also included how some women's voices nowadays sound like they're a young child), without looking at the physiological/anatomical aspect at all.

I'm going to have to come back to this later because I really have to get to the shops

Could be. If it was, it was from early in the year before KUHF bumped Fresh Air and Sci Fri for The Texas Standard.

I rarely get a chance to listen to Fresh Air now.

Yes, that's the same story I was listening to. And it was very skewed against women presenters.

http://www.npr.org/2015/07/23/425608745/from-upspeak-to-vocal-fry-are-we-policing-young-womens-voices

That's the one. Because they concentrated so much on female voices and the discrimination/criticism part of this, I think they ignored so many other potential aspects of the story, besides why some women have voices that sound much younger than they actually are - and indeed like children in some cases; such as why this seems to be increasing, and why do more men have softer, almost effeminate voices now? Are there anatomical, physiological or sociological reasons for it? That's what I really wanted to find out and I was disappointed that it was almost completely overlooked.

As far as vocal fry is concerned, again they missed out on the anatomical/physiological side of the issue. Male and female voices are both produced by the same mechanism - vocal chords, but men (generally) have deeper voices which, in the case of men who have particularly deep and sonorous voices, are almost a constant creak, such as an operatic basso profondo (not a typo), so when they 'fry' their voice it doesn't sound as odd or as noticeable as if a woman, with a (generally) softer, more mellifluous (but equally rich) voice does it. So why are women doing it, why are more men having softer voices, and is it really happening more than it used to?

Vocal chords