The term 'vocal fry': where does it come from?

On a recent Language Log posting Vocal fry: "creeping in" or "still here"?, Mark Liberman discusses an (also) recent article about the phenomenon of 'vocal fry' and shows how it has been around for quite awhile in the US (lots of references in that blog post).

I personally had never heard of this term, have never heard anybody talk about this phenomenon, have never heard anybody talk in the described manner, and frankly can't hear anything special in those utterances even where pointed out.

But my sound-blindness is not the issue. What I'd like to know is where the term 'vocal fry' comes from. Who coined it or where did people start using it? Presumably it is metaphorical (a 'frying' sound?). The blog posting doesn't address that, and wading through the references hasn't turned up anything yet.

Solution 1:

Exactly right, it's because it's supposed to sound like the popping or sizzling of bacon frying.

the term was first used in "Dynamic Variations of the Vibratory Pattern in the Normal Larynx" by Paul Moore and Hans Von Leden in 1959 as far as I can find.

Solution 2:

I wrote an article about this in 2009. It's mostly heard with very young women and girls. I believe it's called vocal fry, because the voice sounds as if it's been fried and has become raspy. Young girls sound bitter and cynical when they growl at the end of a sentence.

It very likely began with the Gen X mothers of the Millennias. This generation is scornful of the values of their Baby Boomer parents who left them a legacy of fractured families and federal deficits. Dad was promised a gold watch but got a pink slip instead. Thus, they are cynical and trust only themselves; team play is for Boomers.

As Gen X girls came of age, sturdy, clunky shoes became the rage. Colette Dowling’s 1981 book “The Cinderella Complex” may have inspired them to convey to the world that they had both feet planted firmly on the ground and were not about to depend on a man to take care of them. Sadly, they entered the workforce and encountered the Glass Ceiling.

So, the stage was set for many of these young women to express their cynicism more and more. It can only be assumed that either directly or indirectly their young daughters subconsciously picked it up. Within a few years, their friends picked it up. Now it’s apparently a part of their persona. I truly hope it’s not too late to snuff out this unfortunate trend.

Solution 3:

I have antedated "glottal fry" to 1942, in an article by Henry Moser in the Journal of Speech Disorders. As I wrote in https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/get-your-creak-on/>this article:

Moser was able to guide the man to a normal voice by means of

the ‘glottal fry' attack. It is a method I have used with considerable >success and one which I do not believe is well known. It is very easy to >demonstrate but extremely difficult to describe. You may recognize it as >the sound produced by many youngsters in imitating a motorboat but to me it >more nearly resembles the sound of vigorously popping corn.

I also note in the article that the first attestation of "vocal fry" that I found was in the book Voice and Articulation, published in 1958, by Charles van Riper. This is earlier than the 1959 date in an earlier comment by one year. As for the 1949 date in another earlier comment, as best I can tell, this book was published in the 1960s, but I can't view the title page close enough to see.