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:
“I will frankly declare, that after passing a few weeks in this valley of the Marquesas, I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained. But alas! since then I have been one of the crew of a man-of-war, and the pent-up wickedness of five hundred men has nearly overturned all my previous theories.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955)