Like others here, I'd never heard the term vocal fry, but I've definitely heard it used many times. I agree it sounds dismissive, and reminds me of the classic teenage eye roll and shrug combo. An, "I'm just too cool to give a darn about anything", attitude right out of adolescence. It makes the speaker sound immature to me.
This is a fascinating discussion! I've got a theory about the various words and phrases that people find annoying. If they are new to us we notice them, and tend to take them more literally - they start to become annoying, but if we use the same type of nonsensical filler (and I believe most of us do to varying degrees), we don't truly hear it, it's background noise. What we don't hear can't annoy us.....
.... Hmmmmm, that theory made sense in my head anyway, but I may need to work on it a bit more.
