Pass the Muffs

As if I needed one more mouth noise to hate, my ears have again become tangled in the briars of ruckus other people make with their pie holes.  This is slightly different from the food smacking that I usually struggle with in that it’s not technically a noise so much as it is speech patterns.  Just when I thought it was me being silly about these new trends I was picking up, a little research on Google and YouTube verified that titles have been assigned and mayday calls have been to address them.

The first is called high rising terminal or up-talking.  It’s when sentences end in a high inflection as if someone were asking a question even while making statements.  This one wears me slap out and is simply painful to digest.  NPR is the official sponsor for infecting the planet with this virus.  Actually, NPR is responsible for enabling dozens of adult commentators, opinion-ators, experts, and loons to not work on their lisps and exercise their obnoxious pronunciations (genre=zzzhhaaaun?) while working in the medium whose only output is SOUND.  But that’s another post.

One can hardly turn on NPR news without hearing interviews with experts and laity alike spinning their story with such heavy up-talking that it is almost impossible to decide if they are stating their position, asking permission to feel the way they do, or asking for clarification about the facts they are sharing.  I’m talking about even simple subjects like, “And then the sky became dark.  Then it sounded like a freight train was coming.  And the tornado destroyed my writing nook and dream journal.”

I haven’t watched the whole video posted below, but this lady hates up-talking as much I do and even claims it’s infesting the work place and preventing people from climbing the ladders of success.  I believe she even lays out strategies for conquering your own up-talking habits.  Here’s my one point strategy for conquering your up-talking habits:  Stop doing it.

The other one is called vocal fry.  This is when people crunch up their vocal chords to make themselves sound growly.  It doesn’t get under my skin nearly as deeply as up-talking (probably because it’s less rampant and obvious).  I just think it’s goofy.  There is an upper executive who I work with that does this often at meetings and one-on-one conversations.  Deaton adopts this pattern when he drops in the “I’m a cool teenager that you’ll never figure out” zone.  I don’t bust his chops about it, I just don’t understand how that is intended to emphasize confidence.  I haven’t watched this whole video either, but she gives a great, yet over the top, example of vocal fry.

And finally, I’ll throw in a bonus new rendition of an old mouth noise that is killing me un-softly:  Gum smacking coupled with heavy mouth breathing while talking on the phone.  I guess most everyone learned that gum chewing is a public event where everyone wants to hear and see what you have going on inside your maw.  Even my own mother, who is Emily Post’s protege, can get crazy with some Wrigley’s.  I’ve accepted that and do my best to avoid the practitioners while they are partaking in their sport, but I’m forced to have phone conversations with folks everyday who love them some gum and want the world to hear them rejoice as they gnaw away.  Our land lines at work are extremely sensitive so I get to hear them with Dolby surround quality as they intake air through their nose, smack-mmm, mmm-smack-mmm, smack-mmm, exhale through their mouths all over the phone mic, and then smack-mmm, smack-mmm, smack-mmm some more.

I asked a guy last week during a semi-important call to please stop smacking his gum because I honestly could not understand what he was trying to say.  “Oh, sorry,” he said…then continued with his amazing smacking-mouth-breathe tactic until my ears were bleeding all over the phone receiver.

“Seriously,” I told him, “I can’t hear what you’re saying and your gum smacking is sending me to a bad place.”

“Oh, wow,” was his reply.  “Now I know how to tick you off.”

“It doesn’t tick me off,” I explained as I wiped the blood off the phone and tears from my eyes.  “It sends me to another place…like what happens to Dr. Banner right before he Hulks out.”  This was by no means a threat, it was a plea for him to help me avoid getting fired for ripping off my clothes and throwing my phone, computer, and lunchbox off of the mezzanine outside my office.

I’ve decided to fix my inability to tolerate mouth sounds by starting a trend of counter mouth sounds to block the bad ones out.  I’ll call it the Chamberlain.  (I didn’t make this video.  My apologies for the printed f-bomb at the end.)