At year’s end, this blog discussed an extremely bothersome if not perhaps stomach-turning conversational technique known as uptalk or upspeak which has spread like an epidemic. It’s like chalk on a blackboard (assuming blackboards still exist). You’ve heard it all over television and radio even from broadcast professionals and the speech pattern has unfortunately seeped into day-to-day life. This is the tendency for a speaker to end a simple declarative clause or sentence as if it is a question. read more