If you have a teenager or were one anytime in the last decade, the word "like" is likely a part of your vocabulary in a way it wasn't for prior generations. At first it seemed like "valley girl" slang, but by the 90s everyone was saying it, and I know it crept into my vocabulary with ease. During a (short-lived) period of trying to be taken seriously, I made an effort to eliminate it from my speech (at least in certain situations), but I quickly grew frustrated because it seemed I had no substitute for the functions "like" performed. I had a bit of a crisis — I'm fairly intelligent, have I just lost how to talk without it? Was there a word, or a grammatical structure, that I used before and can't recall? Turns out, maybe not! Academics and linguists actually LIKE "like", saying it's innovative and original... and it's here to stay. What's your relationship with "like?" Do you use it? Does it grate on your nerves, or is it essential?
Blog Of The Nation
I am thirteen, and I do use "like" in speech. However, most of the time this occurs when I am either making a joke (saying something similar to "Well, now that don't ,like,work, do it?"), or I may use it to convey an approximation.("Just slap like a 300 ohm resistor in series with the LED, and you won't be spending so much money on replacement LED's")
It greatly annoys me, however, when people use it in serious writing.
I'm afraid I'm showing all of my 55 years when I say that "like" used in a sentence to connote something other than appreciation or comparison, grates on my nerves. My daughter's friends used to say, "And I'm all like, and he's all like." instead of, "I said and he said." Ugh!
I think maybe the word "why" was a similar grammatical pothole in previous generations, as in "If you had a quarter, why, you could go into town and see the pictures."
Perhaps the use of the word "like" is because people who use it often in speech do not take the time to think out what they are going to say before saying it, and believe that a long string of "like"s sounds better than a few "um"s.
Speaking of language: Is it true that the so-called grammar vandal is going to waste precious TOTN air time with her smug self-congratulatory drivel? (She says on her blog that she is booked for the show on July 23.) I'm sure she seemed cool and hip when you called to book her after seeing the write up in the Globe last week, but since then her blog has spiraled quickly downward to expose laziness, inaccuracies, and underwhelming mediocrity. Isn't there a war or a national issue or anything more deserving of air time than this sophomoric navel gazing?
Comments
Discussions for this story are now closed. Please see the Community FAQ for more information.