Re: the "Canadian accent."

I live in Seattle and I've been to Vancouver, B. C. about forty-eleven times. And my sister Mary married a Canadian law student who went on to become a Provincial Judge in Ontario. They have visited here in Seattle a number of times and I once spent a couple of weeks with them in Kingston, Ontario.

SOME Canadians do the "oot, aboot, and around the hoose" thing, but not ALL. I can't pin it down as a regionalism because I've heard in both in Vancouver and in Kingston. My brother-in-law, the judge, does in on some words, and my sister, who has lived in Canada for a number of decades, has picked it up. On a FEW words.

But definitely not every Canadian I've met.

No big deal. I've heard even bigger variations in speech between people who live in the west coast of the U. S. and people I met in Kansas when Barbara and I visited her mother there.

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On the "vocal fry" thing:

I think I can speak with a certain authority on this issue. I've taken singing lessons from three different voice teachers over a period of several years, and they, of course, covered matters of tone production and speech. Plus, before I went into radio, I took a course in broadcasting, which included a section called "Broadcast English."

In Broadcast English, the idea was to eliminate regionalisms and odd-ball mannerisms in vocalization and pronunciation and teach the students to use "Standard American Speech." Something like "vocal fry" would have been thoroughly jumped on as a very bad speech habit in the Broadcast English course.

And all three of my singing teachers would have been horrified to find one of their vocal students falling into a speech habit like that, because that little "rasp" at the end of a word and/or sentence is quite hard on the vocal folds. If done over a period of time, it will eventually lead to chronic laryngitis—and much worse.

In the young, it's an attempt to sound "cool," and in others, it's an attempt at pseudo-sophistication. That's why some elderly dowager ladies have baritone speaking voices.

BAD!!

Don Firth