Thanks to Lake Bell, “Sexy Baby Voice” Could Actually Die
And not soon enough.
Better Late Than Never Dept: My most heartfelt, if belated, thanks to actress/director Lake Bell, who in 2014 gave a name to the current most annoying trend in decades, specifically women speaking in what she terms “sexy baby voice” in everyday life rather than reserving it solely for the bedroom.
I’ve tried to make people aware of the problem for years and only received blank, faux-amused stares in response. It was like being the only person who saw all the ghosts everywhere. But vindication has arrived at last, praise the gods. I will, by God, raise the phrase from its moldy cable-TV grave and make it happen.
The sexy baby voice trend, Bell asserted, has its origins in early reality TV, thanks to vacuous lucky-sperm-winners Paris Hilton and the Kardashians, who, while attempting to disguise their obvious discomfort with TV cameras, tend to speak in a ridiculously high register, with way-too-enthusiastic “uplifts” in inflection, basically sounding like toddlers who are thrilled to report that they’ve at last worked their way up to “C” in their scowling study of the English alphabet. I would hasten to add that very often in “sexy baby voice,” an “ay” sound or “eh” sound is replaced by an “ih” sound, for instance “bank” becomes “bink,” and “thank you” (which, over the years, somehow also grew an extra superfluous syllable at the end) becomes “think yew-ah.” Like when you go to the bank, and the female teller says “I’m so glad you’re binking with us, have a great day and think yew-ah.” That.
If there’s anything that has made me certifiably nuts over the last decade, it’s sexy baby voice. Linguists would probably argue about it, because that’s what they do, but to me, sexy baby voice is in part the mutant, brain-damaged descendant of the “Valley Girl talk” of the 1980s, which gave us crutch words like “totally” and “ohmigod,” and would occasionally borrow surfer phraseology like the mercifully short-lived “tubular.”
In a 2013 interview with Conan O’Brien, Bell perhaps too blithely stated that sexy baby voice is used by women who “have been victimized, they’ve fallen prey to something.” If I may expand on that, by indulging in sexy baby voice, young women are foregoing any pretense of maturity and surrendering all their power, abandoning their gender/generational battles rather than stepping into the ring with hostile boomer Karens and horny men.
I dearly hope that sexy baby voice will burn itself out soon. After that, the next thing that absolutely has to go is the maniacally overused crutch word “amazing.” There is literally no such thing as “amazing macaroni and cheese,” or an “amazing episode of Kevin Can Wait.” It must stop.
The first step toward ending the spread of a mortally dangerous virus is by first baptizing it with an idiom. Thank you, Lake Bell, for endeavoring to save the species from itself.
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