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Much Ado About Publishing
Invasion of the Valley Girl Editors
When I was four years old, I returned from my first day at nursery school and announced to my mother, “You talk funny.”I’d decided that I talked just swell, and so did the people at school. It was my mother, who, by comparison, didn’t sound quite right to my ear.
You see, even at that young age, I was already speaking perfect Broadcast English, completely devoid of accent. This delighted my father, who spoke the same way, and who encouraged this in me and my younger brother. The rest of the whole extended family spoke with accents, including New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Philadelphia.
As adults, it’s no surprise that my brother and I have both worked in TV and radio, and have also done voice-overs. Even as kids, we could’ve filled in for Walter Cronkite.
My brother’s kids, though, are another story. They talk funny.
I blame California. My brother and his family don’t live there, but it’s California’s fault all the same.
That’s because my teenage nieces talk like the state’s infamous “Valley Girls.”
They always have. They don’t slip in and out of it, like some private teenage language. This is their permanent dialect. The same goes for millions of other teens and young adults around the country. Accents and speech patterns used to be regional, but TV and movies have made it possible for one region’s dialect among teens to travel around the country, and to stick. And then to be passed along, year after year, to the next wave of teens.
With all due respect to the integrity of accents, this Valley Speak has got to go. It’s hung around since the ‘80s, and it wasn’t supposed to be permanent and global. Let’s face it, it was first presented to us in a movie as a goof.
It’s unnatural to end every sentence with an inflection that makes it sound like a question. It’s equally unnatural for a sentence to have no actual words in it, just “place savers,” such as like, um, you know, and well. And then there’s that thing that sounds like a cross between uh-huh and a squeaky hiccup.
Valley Speak has been around so long now that plenty of professionals in their 20s and 30s still speak this dialect they learned as kids, including the majority of women (and even a few men) under 35 in publishing and media, two industries you’d think would place a premium on communication and language skills.
This makes it virtually impossible to have anything resembling an articulate conversation with them. You have to be a mind reader to figure out what they might be trying to tell you when you’ve asked a question, and their answer is a sing-song “Oh, um, we, like, you know…okaaaaaaaay?”
I had a conversation not long ago (okay, that’s not really accurate – my end of it was conversation, but her end was positively prehistoric, with squeaks instead of grunts) with the assistant editor of a snooty magazine that every author would kill to be published in, and you would’ve thought I was talking with a 14-year-old babysitter who spent most of her life trolling through the mall.
I couldn’t imagine her reading, much less having a hand in editing, a single word in this revered publication. Perhaps she was a Seventeen magazine intern who’d bounced into the wrong office, sat down at the desk, and nobody’d figured this out yet.
We’re all stuck in a bad science fiction movie, aren’t we? It’s Invasion of the Valley Girl Editors, except it isn’t over in 90 minutes, or even two hours…oh, my God…It’s All-Valley-Speak-All-The-Time, and no matter where you go you can’t escape it, and it’s the end of civilization as we know it!
I guess that’s what some people also thought in previous generations when schools stopped routinely teaching Latin, and when people were no longer speaking the King’s English.
Oh, well, cheerio, ta-ta, and God Save the Queen.
Like, for sure.
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Nina L. Diamond is a journalist, essayist, and the author of Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers & Healers. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Omni, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald.
Ms. Diamond was a writer and performer on Pandemonium, the National Public Radio (NPR) satirical humor program, for its entire run in Miami and select markets nationwide from 1984-1998. As an editor, she works frequently with other authors and journalists on both fiction and non-fiction.