ack

[fox]

Oh my god, person who really works here, please SHUT. UP.

There's a girl in a cube two "doors" down and across the "hall" who is, I'm sure, very nice, but who has that particular Carolina (either NC or northern SC; it's hard for me to tell) accent that just pierces your brain when it comes at you with the timbre of a woman's voice. My friend Son of a Preacher Man has that accent, but his voice is low enough that it didn't give me a headache; my first college roommate had that accent, and it made me want to die. And lest you think this had anything to do with my extra-dialectal relationship with that roommate, my friend Future Daughter-In-Law of a Preacher Man has that accent, and I like her a lot but her voice does tend to find the weak spot on my skull and hit it repeatedly with a sharpened hammer.

So, yeah. Working on Temp Headache, Day Two (somehow before yesterday she wasn't talking that much -- oh! I remember on Monday she was saying how she was getting over a cold; maybe that made her voice mellower), on account of the chirpy real employee over there. Gah.

Comments

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Southern women are also conditioned to speak in higher-pitched voices, and with more variation in pitch and volume and speed, than women in other parts of the country. It's one aspect of the mystique with men, I think: Southern women are just more so.

Florence King's Southern Ladies and Gentlemen is hilarious, though somewhat outdated, but she describes the phenomenon something like this: A Southern woman is raised to want to create a devastating effect on a man. An erection is a devastating effect, but if she can't manage that, a splitting headache is better than nothing.

I don't even have a Southern accent any more, but sometime I'll do a voice post so you can hear me do the Southern woman's mating call ("Y'all, I am so drunk!") for you.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

I don't doubt anything you say. But somehow, other women's southern accents (Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, central Virginia -- I'm trying to think of other southern accents I have known, and at the moment that's all I can come up with) don't hit me the way the particular Carolina one does.

I had a co-worker with the same voice, too, now that I think about it, about five years ago, and I wasn't the only one who genuinely couldn't work in the same room with her.

I think you've left off the "ohmagawd" from the beginning of your mating call.

[thermidor.livejournal.com]

I think I know the accent you mean. I have a coworker who has that awful screechy thing, and I think it's from the SC/NC/GA not-quite mountains area.

It kills my ears, and my family has been in SC for 300+ years. So we don;t ALLtalk like that.

If you ever want to compare, you can call my voicemail and hear me talk ;)

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Now this is probably generational. Using 'God' as an oath was very much frowned upon when I was growing up, even in my swingin' liberal neighborhood.

[kmg-365.livejournal.com]

I think I could tolerate that voice. Before we moved to our new building, I shared a floor with a woman who talked and laughed like Fran Dresher. Seriously. Nails on a freakin' chalkboard.

And she must have been speaking from the diaphragm, because man did her voice project!