Happy Nice Mall

So colloquially, there are these things that come out over time and then they seem to be everywhere and we call them trends, right? So in a world where there are more recorded conversations than ever before, and more access to all that conversation, these changes can happen very quickly, but also harder to isolate, right? So there’s actually a whole field of this, and it’s actually called linguistics, and it’s a really good tool for understanding the world around us.

True?

Maybe you know someone who talks like that. This is a confusing way of speaking, one that combines high self-confidence with tense filler words and a fear of pause. Maybe you’ve heard this voice talking about breast stocks with a date.

Maybe you hear on TV or on a podcast making an implausible editing suggestion explaining which complex things are really simple and which simple things are actually complex. Maybe it’s a manager in an earnings call, an interview, or step-by-step through a stage, delivering a Jobs-like message in a Gates-like tone.

Maybe you’ve heard of Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook. The style did not originate from him, and he is not responsible for its spread. However, it may be its most visible and successful practitioner.

Mr. Zuckerberg can be heard explaining all sorts of topics during his frequent public appearances: the future of technology (“in terms of augmented reality, that’s right, so there’s virtual reality….”); the early days of his social network (“no feed, right?”); human progress (“correct, that is, life expectancy has gone from about 50 to about 75”); Facebook’s mission (“you know, what I care about is giving people the power to share, giving everyone a voice so we can make the world more open and connected. Right?”); “history of science” (“the greatest scientific discoveries are driven by new tools, right, new ways of seeing things, right?”).

This is the voice of someone – in this case, and usually a man – who is so comfortable that he is never bothered to talk about almost any topic. (This is Sheryl Sandberg’s careful, restrained voice, not Elon Musk’s booming awkwardness.) By default, it’s one of the defining communication styles of its time. True?

Well.

ZuckTalk is an unpolished way of speaking that is showcased in contexts where polish is traditional. This is a linguistic hoodie in a metaphorical boardroom. It is more than a collection of tics, but its tics are essential to understanding it.

A: well. Another: True? In Zuckerberg’s final form, it was combined into a programmatic if-then binding act: True? Well.

Linguistic observers have noted for years the marked rise of “so” associated with the popularization of certain topics and styles of speech. Anand Giridharadas in The New York Times in 2010 announced the arrival of a new variant of the humble word.

“’So’ new can be ‘fine’, ‘um’, ‘oh’ and ‘like’. Not content with hiding in the middle of sentences anymore, he jumped to the beginning,” he wrote, telling journalist Michael Lewis that he had documented its use among programmers at Microsoft more than a decade ago.

in 2015, a story Geoff Nunberg, the program’s longtime linguist, explained this use of “so” for “Fresh Air” on NPR as a cue used by “people who can’t answer a question without speeding you up in the back story first.” said. Hence its name: backstory “so”.

Syelle Graves, a linguist and vice-director of the Graduate Center for Language Education in a Cross-Cultural Context, at the City University of New York, writes her thesis on this particular “i.e.,” Analyzing a sample of spontaneous, unwritten American speech from 1990 to 2011, he concluded that this use of “so” has indeed increased significantly, often as a proxy for “good.”

By examining the posts on the Internet, He also discovered that people not only notice the spread, but are often offended. Dr. “One of the most surprising results was that some of the public posters associated the backstory ‘that way’ with women, but many associated it with men,” Graves wrote in an email.

Later, Dr. Graves conducted a survey in which subjects responded to recordings of men and women who gave the same answers to the questions, adding the words “such” and “good” at the beginning. “In summary, the woman who answered ‘yes’ was rated as less authoritative, more fashionable, and more ‘valley girl’ than the woman who answered questions well,” he said.

“The guy who answered the questions with the back story ‘it is’ was less likeable, more condescending, and more like a ‘tech bro’ than the same recording of the same guy who answered ‘well’,” she said.

Speakers loosely associated with any of California’s seemingly linguistically lush valleys—Silicone to the north, San Fernando to the south—were often “perceived as less intelligent, less professionally competent, and less mature, among other things.”

True?

Well, to the “so” era” another linguistic trend was getting even more attention: voice frying.

The term describes a style of speech – also known as a “squeaky voice” – that carries with it a range of gendered connotations. Research has suggested that women with vocal fry are often rated as less competent, less intelligent, and less qualified.

In popular culture, vocal frying joke, then his defense is small why; In YouTube’s countless comment sections, it was a way for sexist people to masquerade as relevant prescriptive linguists to once again complain about how women talk.

Male coded speech styles are subject to slightly less scrutiny. That doesn’t mean they go completely unnoticed. Users on Quora are a kind of professional-grade Yahoo! The male-distorting answers, popular with tech and those working in tech-adjacent industries, returned to the same question time and time again: “When and why did everyone start ending sentences with ‘true’?”

This is called “correct” on a question tag such as the English “innit”, the Canadian “eh” or the French “n’est-ce pas”. (See also: “Is it true?” “Is it not?” “No?” “Okay?”)

“Right” to hear what Quora users say it is endemic in their world. “I suspect this speaking technique may have evolved as a result of the proliferation of podcasts, TED Talks and NPR-type radio shows,” wrote one user. “Since they are not interested in what you have to say, they just want you to confirm/confirm what they are saying.”

“It may be linked to narcissism or a borderline personality disorder,” another user wrote. A third said, “It seems very common among Silicon Valley intellectuals.”

Micah Siegel, venture capitalist and former Stanford professor, joined a Quora thread with an unusually specific theory. “My view is that this is a classic speech virus,” he wrote. “I believe it started in the particle physics community in the early 1980s, spread to the solid-state physics community in the mid-1980s, and then spread to the neuroscience community in the late 1980s. It seems that it has only become mainstream in the last few years. I’m not sure what caused this latest bounce.”

Mr. Siegel is not alone in observing the prevalence of “is it true?” among academics in the sciences; a 2004 paper found that the corresponding forms of “ok” and “correct” were used far more often in natural science courses than in humanities courses by linguist Erik Schleef, suggesting that they should “check comprehension more often than humanities instructors.”

A reasonable answer to Mr. Siegel’s question about what caused “right” to enter “mainstream” speech is that people with academic backgrounds like him – familiar with the culture of speaking and presentation, most comfortable in environments with specialized shared expertise – are now in public. . numbers. They work on companies and products that have become extremely powerful outside of the worlds in which they were built fairly quickly.

No matter how credible the linguistic laboratory leak theory may be, it is “correct” and its many variants have achieved wide community dissemination. Writing for The Cut in 2018 by Katy Schneider diagnosed Mark Cuban with serious accuracy.

“He disguises ‘truth’ as ​​a question, but in reality it’s the opposite: a flat, emotionless confirmation of everything he’s just said, a short, positive pause between a confident statement and another,” he wrote. He soon heard it everywhere, “frequently used by experts, podcast hosts, TED Talk speakers.”

Mignon Fogarty, host of the “Grammar Girl” podcast and author of seven books on language, warns that distress and recognition often go hand in hand when it comes to language changes. “When you don’t like someone, it’s easy to criticize their speech as a way of manifesting it,” he said. As someone who records a weekly audio program on language, he knows this firsthand.

In 2014, after receiving complaints about how often she started sentences with “so”, Ms. Fogarty suggested a story idea to one of the contributors: Is this habit condescending? Author Graves, and the answer turned out to be complicated.

well

For a young, rising Facebook founder, buzzing around the building on his way to the field was part of the job, among other things. Mr. Zuckerberg’s former songwriter, Kate Losse, described her speaking style in her memoir “Boy Kings” as “a combination of effective shorthand and imperial confidence”. Also: it’s “straight” but has a “boyish cadence”.

But business has changed. Could this be why ZuckTalk is starting to sound a bit old as a way of speaking? Or maybe just everywhere.

Even Mr. Zuckerberg seems to have noticed. According to transcripts from Marquette University Zuckerberg Files project, distilled “Is it true? ie ”construction, after a peak in 2016 — there is so much to talk about! There is so much to tell! – Disgrace in the Facebook creator’s lexicon.

He is right at home in the world he helped create, but “right” and “so”. They are tools for the explainers among us, and they have multiplied in this way: in media interviews, seminars, talks and speeches. Now, thanks to social media – the machine in constant motion – everyone has the chance or the need to explain themselves in front of an audience.

“So” is comfortable in front of the YouTube video; “right” easily punctuates Instagram Live; a “right? That’s why” maneuver removes dead air from a podcast. These emote returns are not likely to disappear anytime soon, so we better get used to them. True?

For Context is a column that explores the limits of digital culture.