yup, that's it. nomad is right, part of it may have something to do with immaturity/insecurity, but in the end it can make halfway intelligent people appear to be a lot less intelligent. aside from being annoying, i think it could actually even limit someone's career development in a business environment.
i dunno
i was talking about this w/ a friend who mine who was in law school at the time and she said every girl in her classes did it...
i see/hear apparently well off corporate girls talk like this all the time... i find it a real turn off, b/c as people have said, it makes you sound DUMB and UNSURE...
"so, uh, last week? i went to a conference? In London?"
i just want to grab them and go, "DID YOU? DID YOU? FOR CHRIST SAKES, SPIT IT OUT, GIRL! TELL ME, I CAN HANDLE IT!"
not to bring down the level of discourse, but although this is primarily a white girl thing, when asian girls get a hold of it, they can take it to a whole nother level... i should record this girl i work with who talks as if she is just contantly confused... like she just landed on this planet 15 minutes ago...
but, yeah, it def first appeared in LA (ie. San Fernando VALLEY) and just spread... i guess one of the advantages of it is that it has a cool laid back detachedness to it ("like, WHATEVER...) and it's non-threatening w/o being submissive by allowing for a cooler than thou level of sarcasm (anyone who has seen Paris Hilton on The Simple Life deploy "That's Hot" in a manner that implies the recipient is anything but can attest to that...)
i guess one of the reasons it has spread is that it is partially a genuine regional accent and partly an inflection that can be applied to numerous other accents...
another spreading californism is the "o" sound that it shares w/ baltimore and philly:
valley:
This means that a word like two comes out sounding more like “tih-oo” (think of dude as an example of a word that often has a fronted vowel), and a word like no sounds a little like “neh-ow
baltimore:
[oʊ] shifts to [eʊ]; one cheers for the Eh-ew's (O's, for the Baltimore Orioles).
i did read an article about this recently, but damned if i can find it... apparently it is one of the fastest spreading trends in the US... like 30 years ago, it was ONLY found in Philly/B-more and SoCal and now it is everywhere...