And although uptalk has been most common among teen-agers, in particular young women, it seems to be spreading.

Nobody knows exactly where uptalk came from.

Some twentysomethings say uptalk is part of their attitude: cool, ironic, uncommitted.

I realized then that I was unwittingly, unwillingly speaking uptalk.

He insists that the spread of uptalk indicates the lack of shared knowledge in our society.

My speculations have some support; there are linguists who see uptalk as being about uncertainty and deference to the listener.

She observed uses of intonation in a Texas sorority, where uptalk was not at all about uncertainty or deference.

The sorority members' own interpretation of uptalk was that it was a way of being inclusive.

Since McLemore did her study, people are constantly calling to her attention other uses of uptalk.

I confess to ambivalence about uptalk.

As a song ended, the band members looked to her and she asked, in a gentle uptalk: "Do you think we could have a little more dynamically?

I myself was convinced that uptalk was tentative, testing, oversensitive; not feminine so much as wimpy, detumescent.

Once commercial airline pilots start using uptalk, McLemore notes, it will mean that a full-blown dialect shift has occurred.

Cynthia McLemore, a University of Pennsylvania linguist who knows as much about uptalk as anyone, says the frequency and repetition of rises mark a new phenomenon.

It seems to me that "uptalk" is tentative, makes no commitment and can easily be retracted: Is it O.K. that Captain McCormick is our pilot?

Deborah Tannen - a linguist at Georgetown, who, with her book "You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation," may have overtaken Noam Chomsky and become the best-known linguist in America - contends that broad theorizing about uptalk is downright foolish.