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Laugh Enhancement? by Carol Wells

Fads come and go. Some gain enough popularity to last for a few years, such as with the baggy pants attire. Other fads are in then out the back door before you had a chance to appreciate their presence. Then there are phases a person goes through. It is enough to make a parent wonder what is up their child's sleeve next. Take, for example, the laugh enhancement phase my daughter is going through...

My second-born child had a delightful laugh. Notice the wording took that to being a past tense thought shared from my side.

Not that her laugh was any more delightful than her siblings but just that we miss it at times. Upon entering her teens, my daughter decided that her laugh needed modification and for no other explanation offered outside of, "I could..."

Occasionally we will hear the natural rippling sounds of her laughter. Most of the time, however, the new and improved version is what we are treated to hearing.

If she had modified the laugh to improve it then I could understand. Perhaps this is part of the "generation gap" between a child and their parent. I thought her laugh was sweet and melodic already, she thought her laugh needed more ... well, debating if gusto is the correct word to use.

My daughter adopted, what I can only describe as being, a horselaugh. The effect completed with exaggerated intakes of air that sounds like ... well, nothing human. You can imagine my reaction when she decided to unveil her new enhanced laugh inside of a car while I was driving.

This laugh is supposedly, or so she informs me, cool sounding. I personally think it is not only fake sounding but also grating to the ear. She defends her sound effect claiming that her friends like her new laugh, which has me reserving judgment about her friends' sense of taste as a result.

Perhaps this may be hinting of a generation gap starting to exist between because, as a parent, I am unable to understand why I now have what sounds like a product of Mr. Ed's affair with a Canadian goose laughing at my jokes.

At least I am grateful that she has not topped this with adopting phonetic spelling. "'K, talk 2 u l8r!" I would be sitting here for a few minutes trying to decipher what the person tried to tell me.

So, as grating and false sounding as the laugh may be, I am relieved I can understand what she is writing and I don't have to ponder how jeans remain on her hips [baggy or Britney "barely there to cover anything" Spears style] or cringe because she is sporting a 'camel toe'. On the bright side, maybe the laugh is one of those 3 to 4 years in length fads. I have my fingers crossed that maybe this is true and I have passed the halfway point.

Humorous Book Recommendations:             [ view all ]
Fraud: Essays
[David Rakoff; 256 pages]
David is another regular, of sorts, that appears on NPR's This American Life. Fraud is a collection of pieces shared in various magazines and on radio where David shares, and revels, his world-weary satirical humorous perspective. To those of us who counted the minutes to the end of a show ... can you relate?

The square people think I’m too hip, and the hip people think I’m too square.
-- Cher

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