It seems that there has been a global catastrophe in the English language, with the possibility of the many languages I don’t speak. The extremely excessive use of the word “like” is crippling the vocabulary of the youth.
Every day in class when a professor poses a question to a student, the student will answer back with some partial form of an answer surrounded by scattered “likes,” and summing up their argument of an answer with a defiant, “Do you get what I’m saying?”
Ah, yes. We get what you’re saying. You’re saying that because you have no clue what the answer is, or you have the very smallest of ideas as to what it is, you assume that you can dance around with your tongue making no sense of what is coming out of your mouth. Then, after you do the verbal hokey pokey, you have the audacity to think that that would be a suitable answer.
“Like” has developed its own culture, the counterculture of proper English. It has become synonymous with multiple meanings, mainly those of “I don’t know” or “kind of, but not really –ish.” The worst part? It seems that no one notices that they do it.
I have enough of a problem with it. Whenever I catch myself saying the forbidden word, I want to pull my tongue out so I can never be responsible for such a heinous crime to the English language again. Every time it mistakenly or accidentally escapes my lips, I notice it. So how do so many people that say it not notice it? Or do they notice it and just not care?
I get it. It can be frustrating having an idea in your head but not knowing how to vocalize it. My high school biology teacher would say that that would mean you don’t actually know the topic. As a student who has been in that situation, I disagree.
Yes, sometimes it does mean the student doesn’t fully grasp the concept, but sometimes there are those students who just can’t get their brain and mouth on the same level. If you can’t describe what is in your head with your words, just say that you can’t instead of the journalist’s equal to nails on a chalkboard.
It all boils down to the old saying, THINK before you speak. Plan out what words are going to come out of your mouth so you don’t just have randomness blabbering out of your mouth. It’s better to admit that you don’t know how to put your thoughts and ideas into words than to ramble and sound like you have no earthly idea.
I’m curious as to how this phenomenon began. Did someone start it as a joke because they thought it would be hilarious to annoy people by saying “like” after every word? I’m convinced that’s how it started, and that there was that one person who subconsciously picked it up and spread it like the plague.
It is the plague of language. No one is safe, and there is no immunity to it. The only way to slow it down is to correct it when it is noticed. Don’t let this contaminate the next generation and even more of the current generation. Or else we might, like, go insane.
