I can’t tell which of the two hangs me up on the proverbial razor wire: people who can’t stop saying “like” every other word or those who defend this post-modern abuse of English as the natural evolution of language.
For the sake of bookish sobriety, journalistic full disclosure and the fear of not coming-off preachy, I should say that English is not my first language. In fact, it’s not even my second language, though it has certainly become my most admired and often used language.
My gardening skills in the backyard of linguistic expression have been sharpened by prophetic geniuses like Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse and Mark Twain. It is with that almost religious fervor for language that I find myself whirling in discontent when I hear the word “like” used in sentences in much the same way an astrologist uses gullibility of the masses in making a living.
Let us clarify something: “like,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can either be used as “find agreeable, enjoyable, or satisfactory” (I like Woody Allen very much indeed); or “having the same characteristics or qualities as; similar to” (Justin Bieber is like an over-enthusiastic monkey).
You cannot say “Kevin was, like, I'm 'onna hit-you-up later, and I was, like, fo' sho'.” As impressive and articulate (using those words rather loosely) as that sentence may sound in the Starbucks of “cool” expressions, it simply isn’t a humane way of discourse.
At some point, I recall having a bet with a comrade about this very issue: I had wagered it would take a large, pregnant camel to pass through the proverbial eye of the needle, before any random person we see on campus would use the word “as” instead of “like.” I, metaphorically speaking, won the wager.
I don’t know about you, but for me the overabundance of this monster in the now accepted national dialect is indicative of an unorganized mind; a mind that fatuously uses “like” while searching for an interesting thought, finds none and carries-on with an even more unimpressive substitution – “you know”: “he, um, was like…. you know, wanna go out?”
This juvenile manner of speech cannot even be called evolution of language. In the Darwinian sense of the word, evolution is a process of passing through one stage to another, more advantageous stage. Homo sapiens evolved from being quadrupedal (walking on all fours) to bipedal (walking upright) in an evolutionary process that made the transition more advantageous to their survival.
What is the advantage for native English speakers to speak as if they were auditioning for a role in Disney’s “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody”? I say native English speakers because they have a responsibility for setting a standard of discourse that would later be emulated by those for whom English is a second or third language. To quote Wittgenstein, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
So what is to be done about this chronic failure of imagination? Should we continue to entertain anyone who insults our intelligence by speaking to us as if we were their BFF?
Or should we condemn them to eternal laughter, mockery and exclusion from the high society of charming and sexy discourse? The latter sounds like a plan.
Reach Sohail at sbayot@asu.edu
