Show Rundown: January 18, 2017

Good Morning Everybody!

Howard woke up extra early Wednesday morning, which allowed him to reflect once again on the vocal fry pandemic plaguing our great nation … but maybe most noticeably on “The Bachelor.”

“There’s something going on in America called vocal fry where it’s gotten so bad that now it’s becoming an epidemic,” he said.

“And we’ve got to stop it,” Robin Quivers added.

Linguistic experts have offered a number of theories about why women adopted the speech pattern characterized by a frog-like croaking that comes on in waves, usually towards the end of a sentence.

“Ikuko Patricia Yuasa, a lecturer in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, called it a natural result of women’s lowering their voices to sound more authoritative,” Douglas Quenqua reported in the New York Times.

John Carney, Senior Editor for CNBC.com, meanwhile, thinks that vocal fry actually originated with the “wealthy” and “powerful” women of Wall Street. “I think the answer is simple and obvious. It’s a way of presenting seriousness, intelligence, and determination without sacrificing femininity,” he wrote in response to Quenqua’s piece.

Whatever the intended effect, it’s driving Howard nuts and he played some clips from a few of “The Bachelor” contestants who suffered from the worst cases of vocal fry in addition to examples from other media JD Harmeyer found.