Valley Girl

Valley girl (or Val, Val Gal) is a stereotype depicting a socio-economic and ethnic class of white women characterized by the colloquial California English dialect Valleyspeak and vapid materialism. The term originally referred to an ever increasing swell of semi-affluent and affluent middle-class and upper-middle class girls living in the early 1980s Los Angeles bedroom communities of San Fernando Valley. The Valley's proximity to Hollywood and prevalence of Jewish American women among both the demographic and the Los Angeles media machine helped give the stereotype large exposure to the rest of the world.

In time the traits and behaviors spread across the United States and abroad, metamorphosizing into a caricature of unapologetically spoiled "ditzes" and "airheads" more interested in shopping, personal appearance and social status than intellectual development or personal accomplishment.

Read more about Valley Girl:  Sociolect, In Popular Culture

Famous quotes containing the words valley and/or girl:

    How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!
    Denis Diderot (1713–1784)

    When a little girl opens her bright eyes in the sunlight, there is no variety of options.
    Jean Arnold, U.S. inventor. As quoted in Feminine Ingenuity, ch. 9, by Anne L. MacDonald (1992)