So, NPR Voice, Ya Know …

I was frankly a little disappointed to read Teddy Wayne’s recent New York Times piece “‘NPR Voice’ Has Taken Over the Airwaves.” Not that I’m not obsessed with the way people talk on the programs carried by National Public Radio stations. (If you have any doubt on that point, you can read my extensive reflections on the matter here.) The problem — suggested by the singular in the title — is that there isn’t just one NPR voice but a multitude, each with its own characteristic tics and inflections. How could you cram under the same stylistic umbrella Terry Gross’s “Anyways,” Cokie Roberts’s “Look,” Scott Simon and Audie Cornish’s “Help us understand,” Steve Inskeep’s “Oh!,” Linda Wertheimer’s “Now,” and the way so many interviewees now say “Sure” before starting in on their answers?

The answer is you can’t. In fact, Wayne focuses on a particular “verbal mannerism” favored by public-radio personalities who are younger than the eminences I’ve just named:

That is in fact a thing. Other characteristics are vocal fry (both male and female), the greeting “Hey” in two-way conversations, the talking over each other in two-ways, the not infrequent giggling, and, of course, the starting of sentences with the word So. The style can be heard in such programs and podcasts as RadioLab, Reply All, Serial, Planet Money, The TED Radio Hour, and This American Life, whose host and founder, Ira Glass, is the clear pioneer. (If all this is not ringing a bell, someone put out this devastating and hilarious takeoff.)
Wayne is a bit shaky in his sense of the style’s forebears: It’s tough to see any connection with Carrie Bradshaw’s “I couldn’t help but wonder” monologues in Sex and the City, or Michelle Obama’s emotional speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. He’s on more solid ground when he cites David Foster Wallace’s self-conscious faux-folksiness in prose, as analyzed by Maud Newton’s 2011 essay in The New York Times Magazine, “Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace.” Newton still offers the best analysis of how Wallace’s literary use of aggressively unliterary phrases (in one essay he wrote that it was “hard not to sort of almost actually like” someone) was a clever strategy for making “ethical arguments while soothing and flattering his readers and distracting them from the fact that arguments were being made.”

Wallace, Glass, and their followers are on to the fact that the days when we expected and believed in glossy opacity are over. A smooth delivery is no longer trustworthy. In contrast, when a speaker attempts or invokes transparency — putting the process out there, foregrounding his or her hunches or reactions, leaving in the um’s, or embracing what once would have been deemed a speech impediment (Glass voices a velarized alveolar lateral approximant when confronted with the letter “l”) — the result will seem more credible. Wayne quotes Glass: “Back when we were kids, authority came from enunciation, precision. But a whole generation of people feel like that character is obviously a phony — like the newscaster on The Simpsons — with a deep voice and gravitas. ... Any story hits you harder if the person delivering it doesn’t sound like a news robot but, in fact, sounds like a real person having the reactions a real person would.”

The trouble arises when the nonstyle becomes a style. Newton points out, “Wallace’s rhetoric is mannered and limited in its own way, as manipulative in its recursive self-second-guessing as any more straightforward effort to persuade.” Wayne’s piece is a sign that this particular radio manner is starting to be seen as a convention, as predictable and artificial in its way as the old deep-voice Ted Baxter gravitas. It’s probably time for the pendulum to swing back, and for a generation of NPR producers to start editing out “ya know.”