Hello, Santa is here with an offshoot that has nothing to do with Christmas. Let’s call it intentional subversion and not a missed opportunity due to poor planning.
In case you missed the memo, I would like to remind you that it is still not only socially acceptable, but somehow ‘cool’, to hate on things teenagers (especially girls) like (e.g., Taylor Swift: yes, I’m still sour about that sassy Spotify AI) and do (e.g., exist).
Now, we can add something else to this long list of unbearable traits: how young women speak. Some common complaints people have with their speaking style are demonstrations of:
Vocal fry (glottalization): The creaking sound, made popular by the Kardashian clan and Zooey Deschanel, that is heard with the dropping of a voice to its lowest vocal register.
Uptalk: Ending a declarative sentence on a high intonation usually reserved for a question (think: Jeopardy players).
Slang: Yasss, you know how they get flak for spilling the tea and getting jiggy with it (hold on, I’m being told by my cool friends that this is no longer a phrase anyone except Will Smith uses).
Gretchen McCulloch disapproves of these criticisms. In fact, she goes on to argue that “young women are the Uber of language.”
What is the basis of her argument?
She points to William Shakespeare, celebrated as a linguistic disruptor and spreader of neologisms (by popularizing a large number of newly coined words, when not coining new words himself). But while he is praised for heavily influencing the way language evolved, McCulloch highlights that credit is also due to women, who are responsible for 90% of linguistic changes today, by some accounts.
This has also been noted by the linguists at the University of Helsinki, who perused 6,000 letters between 1417-1681 and found that female letter-writers were faster in adapting and changing the way they wrote as compared to male letter-writers. These females spearheaded the adoption of new words while discarding words like “maketh” and “doth”.
Add this to the fact that women have traditionally taken care of children and you get the perfect recipe for linguistic superstardom.
It’s not just women. Adolescents are an adventurous set and this innovation carries over into the sphere of language, making them more likely to experiment with the way they speak, and increasingly, text. The digital disruption has definitely sped up the adoption of new slang (no, not the song, though maybe the band).
A fun example is the phrase ‘on fleek,’ which gained popularity from a teenage girl’s viral Vine video in 2014. With the rise of social media platforms that allow even shorter (and more ridiculous) content creation (I’m looking at you, TikTok: not literally, of course, since it’s been banned), this cycle has shortened. As soon as I learn how to use ‘turnt’ in a sentence, it becomes ‘basic’ and so ‘late 2010s’.
While these are some hefty, well-argued claims by researchers, one should never forget how arbitrary and bizarre the English language is. The language evolves with the involvement of a lot of players but also with a healthy dose of chance.
Joshua Plotkin called this random phenomenon the ‘drift’ of language (observed when people pick up the random words and sentence constructions they overhear). This is different from what he calls ‘natural selection’ (yes, tip your hat to Darwin for this):
New words and grammatical rules are continually cropping up, fighting for existence against established forms, and sometimes driving those old forms extinct. “The survival ... of certain favored words in the struggle for existence is natural selection,” Darwin wrote.
“The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue.”
These two different forces of linguistic evolution sometimes work together. An example given by the researchers is regarding the speedy rise of do in the 16th century:
…Phrases like “You say not” quickly changed into “You do not say.” They concluded that at first, the word randomly drifted its way into questions, so that “Say you?” gradually became “Do you say?” Once it became common, natural selection started pushing it into new contexts like declarative sentences, perhaps because it was easier for people to use it consistently.
But even so, there is enough merit in the attribution of certain linguistic changes to the higher propensity of females and adolescents, and especially of adolescent females, to pick up and use new words, for better or worse.
As the excerpt in the image above reminds us, the underestimation of XX chromosome-carriers is nothing new. Even Gretchen Weiner was told she could never make ‘fetch’ happen. Now look where we are (okay fine, I admit fetch never did happen; you win some, you lose some). The naysayers may still abound but linguistic revolution and change is inevitable and inevitably female. Go tell Mrs. Claus she can stop baking cookies and finish her crime thriller about her husband now.