The Trujillo family had a get-together for Christmas in preparation for sending off our oldest son, Stan, to Denmark, where he may be taking a new job.
Desirous of a boys’ night out, he got together with younger brothers Diego and Ben for an evening away from our house. Stan said, “Dad, we’re going out for a couple of hours?”
And almost as if participating in a really bad high school play, Diego said, “We’ll take our own car?” and Ben cut in with, “So don’t wait up for us?”
What’s going on here! What got these sons to speak on cue? The lines flowed oh-so-trippingly off their tongues, each son tell-asking me a declarogative. I know there’s no such word, but still it describes a kind of talk in which every declarative sentence appears to end with a question mark. Like this?
But why were my sons, all of them on their own, two of them married, and well past their 20s, doing a kind of Valley Girl speak? I shuddered over the tentativeness of their speech. The rising inflection at the end of each of the boys’ statements made it seem as if they were asking permission to leave the house? I almost expected one or all of them to utter “for sure,” “totally” and “awesome.”
Then I wised up. I’d been on the phone with Judee Williams, a retired Pecos school teacher, who suggested I write about the phenomenon called “uptalk.” I’d typed out part of this column on my computer, where my three sons read it and decided to try out this style of discourse. What a relief to realize they’d played a joke on me. On purpose they used uptalk, the kind of language that makes people want to upchuck.
Uptalk, when Googled, produces oodles of hits. Some people call it the discourse of the young. I have my own theories.
Uptalk comes across as if the talker seeks validation for everything he or she says. By planting a question mark at the end of every sentence, the talker braces the reader for feedback, albeit feeble feedback. For example, “I’m going to town” (ending with a period) usually generates a puny, unthinking response such as “Oh, that’s nice.” Is it because people don’t listen? Now if the talker puts a question mark at the end, that alerts the listener that more action is needed. The listener needs to respond. This is a way of taking control of the conversation.
Do people unwittingly insert the interrogative because they’ve gone years without being listened to? Do people even listen?
A few years back, as we were leaving the doctor’s office, my wife Bonnie ran into a supervising teacher she hadn’t seen in years. When the teacher asked why we were there, I uttered something like, “Bonnie finally had her skull removed, got a multi-year contract to kick for the Green Bay Packers and will be addressing the U.N. tomorrow.”
The reply? “Oh, that’s too bad!”
But on second or third thought, what kind of reaction would one expect to such an outlandish statement?
But back to uptalk. Some people refer to uptalk as the practice of creating high-rise terminals, or HRT’s. The rising inflection at the end of any sentence gives the impression of timidity or at least uncertainty. Is the HRT phenomenon a symptom of being overly polite, as if asking the person to give permission or to validate what you’re saying?
Judee Williams says she’s been hearing uptalk from students for years. She explains that only questions answerable by “yes” or “no” require a rising inflection at the end. For example, the ending of “Are you going?” is different from that of “Where are you going?”
There’s been a spate of “uptalk” for as long as I can remember, but it took Williams to introduce me to its name.
I overheard a Highlands coed giving directions to a stranger looking for a New Town business. The student used a series of internal rising inflections to impart the information, and virtually every phrase got punctuated with an question mark.
Here’s what the student said: “First, you turn right on Eighth Street? then you’ll see Bealls? and from there you turn left? and keep going until you get to Seventh Street?”
All those buried interrogatives hardly seem standard fare for a person giving information, as opposed to seeking it.
The multiple question marks were not an indication of unfamiliarity with the topography. Clearly, the student knew all the streets. The embedded question marks instead reflected a continual need for reassurance that the tourist understood her.
By saying “Seventh Street” (with a question mark) she was asking, “Do you understand? Am I going too fast for you?”
Williams, who says she got her fill of uptalk in listening to her students – and later many adults – posits that high-rise terminals in language are a way of making people listen better: If you know whatever the other person is saying will end with a question, you prepare yourself.
And she adds that uptalk may be a result of so many competing influences. “People talk to each other when they’re watching TV. Kids usually have something electronic going on in the background.”
“We talk to TV or a video game, even if they don’t answer back,” Williams said.
Most languages follow the rising inflection for questions. And such a convention is effective. But it’s hard to place too much credence in a person who turns all sentences into questions.
Imagine someone in an authoritative position speaking in uptalk:
You’re under arrest?
You have the right to remain silent?
Before I replace your heart, I’ll have to cut open your chest?
Uptalk probably exists because of the need to be heard. Much more needs to be said about this type of discourse, but right now I’m being beckoned – either through declarative, imperative or helium-filled interrogative sentences — to carry out the trash.