Betch!
It is a truth universally acknowledged that, in the Valley, they speak strangely. Valleygirl-speak has been a joke, or a reference point, since the 1980s. Now comes a comedian named Liam Sullivan, with his alter-ego, Kelly. Kelly is an internet phenomenon who is catching on the way weird things do, like the lip-synching Numa-Numa guy from a few years ago, who brought to the national consciousness the astonishing revelation that there is any such thing as a Moldovan pop song.
Kelly (Liam in glasses and a blond wig, looking like the female version of Garth in Wayne’s world) is a Valley girl whose upper vowels have dropped, and whose lower vowels have palatized until they’ve nearly switched places. She’s a shallow, staring, reactionary mouth-breather, the sort of teen that parents fear producing. And people love her.
“Shut up, betch!” She says, and darned if it isn’t funny. Kelly first caught on in a bizarre YouTube short called “Shoes”. The entire skit is about this obnoxious girl shopping for shoes. “Oh my God, shoes”, she drools, staring in store windows. The whole skit is set to a beat, but the most amusing thing about it is Liam’s impersonation of the current Valley accent.
“These shews are three hundred dah-lers…
These shews are three hundred dah-lers…
These shews are three hundred dah-lers…
LET’S GYET-UHM!!”
If Kelly’s vowels all keep lowering at the rate they are going, we’ll soon have jokes like the British do about their vowels raising:
A judge halts proceedings in his court when he realizes that he left a pertinent document at his cottage, where he’d been perusing it over the weekend.
“Fax it up, sir,” suggests the bailiff.
“Yas, it does, rather,” muses the judge.
