My mother hates when I talk like a Valley Girl. She rolls her eyes and sighs more dramatically than me, she tells me I sound stupid and fake. But it’s like, so totally fun, and girl if it makes me smile shouldn’t I like, so totally do it? But that explanation does not cut it for her. So I told her how Valley speak is, like, basically the new iambic pentameter. Yes mom, Shakespeare who? Milton where? Only instead of the golden 10 syllables per line, alternating stressed and unstressed, and the traditional poetic meter of the good-ole-days, it makes use of rhythmic cadence and patterns of rising intonation (uptalk). Phrases follow predictable patterns so when I say: “Oh my god girl, I like literally can’t…” one might correctly infer the last word to be “even.” That’s prosody, that’s linguistic rhythm, that’s art mom.
We all know the age-old line: Shall I | comPARE | thee to | a SUM-mer’s | DAY? Reading it just doesn’t have the same effect as speaking it in the melodic tone it was written to. I liken this to all the “no duh’s” “as if’s” and “like, totally’s” out there. I bet I can guess how those sounded in your head as you read them, the questioning intonation at the end, the vocal fry of perfection, the exaggerated inflection. Shakespeare, step aside, there’s a new it-girl in town, and she also knows how to create meaning out of delivery. The musicality of Valley speak, the prosodic rhythm, the spoken-word postmodern meter, it all amalgamates into linguistic beauty. Like, actually gag me with a literal spoon. One could even compare it to the epic poetry of yore, where grand narratives of gods and mortals intertwined with fabled wars and intoxicating magic The drama is just as juicy, the quests, trials, and tribulations told with just as much dramatic intensity. If you stress the right syllable, a frappuccino mix-up becomes Circe turning men to swine. And the journey is no less perilous.
Valley speak is preserved through oral story-telling, sound familiar anyone? Homer may have shaped ancient Greek culture, but Valley Girls have defined the cultural values of my time. Irony and parody collapse into each other. Valley speak is like, so totally self-aware and hyper-ironic. It expresses genuine emotion, while mocking itself all the while. Because I, like, so totally care, but not, like, care care, you know? So yeah mom, don’t diss me. I’m a postmodern poet in action, passing on oral tradition and invoking the muse one “like” at a time.
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