The Pitfalls of Linguistic Laziness

Language skills are, like, you know, dying.

Late American author David Foster Wallace once quipped that “listening to most people’s public English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails.” And while that sentiment might strike a chord with the average high school teacher, the vast majority of American English speakers remain oblivious to the atrocities that are being committed against our language with startling frequency. Careful attention to the spoken word in nearly any non-academic setting will reveal that many rules of usage and syntax are often bent, and that all the rest are ignored completely.

 Unlike Mr. Wallace, a self-styled Grammar Snoot who took serious offense at dangling participles and misplaced hyphens, I can turn a blind eye to the sign in the grocery store that reads “10 Items or Less.” I barely even notice anymore when a friend asks me if I want to go to the game “with Matt and I” or uses “comprised of” when he means “composed of.” And I can even listen to my sister talk about “laying out on the beach” without correcting her or thinking less of her as a person. But there is one offense against usage that I find so egregious, so mind-numbingly common in our culture, that I refuse to tolerate it any longer.

Despite the aforementioned rules of usage and syntax, two generations of Americans think it perfectly acceptable to insert the word ‘like’ indiscriminately into conversation. A given person between the ages of 3 and 30 is liable to say ‘like’ once every ten seconds while speaking. If you doubt this statistic, I recommend that you find the nearest teenager talking on a cell phone and start counting. You will find my estimate to be very conservative.

‘Like’ has become the all-purpose filler word of choice for the current age. Careless tongues pepper it into speech wherever there is space: one moment it is an adjective, then the next it becomes an adverb, then a preposition, then a conjunction, and then parts of speech which were hitherto nonexistent. It is now commonplace to hear someone introduce quotations with the word ‘like,’ as in “she was like ‘…’ and then I was like ‘...’ and then he was like ‘...’” and so on. These habits subvert all previously established meanings and uses of the word and replace them with the following two tenets: Do you struggle when trying to summon the correct word in speech? Use ‘like!’ Would you prefer to say a lot of words, but you don’t have many thoughts to accompany them? Use ‘like!’

Not unlike a pox on the English language, ‘like’ has crept into our everyday idiom, slowly wasting away the collective articulation of the populace and reducing an entire nation to employing the verbiage of Valley Girls. It pervades the entertainment industry, news outlets, and even professional settings. Worst of all, it has rendered countless individuals unable to express their thoughts precisely.

Take, for example, the sentence “I have a master’s degree in communication.” Compare this to the decidedly more ambiguous sentence “I have, like, a master’s degree in communication.” If you say that you have “like” a degree in communication, then you are not saying that you have a degree in communication at all. You are effectively saying something entirely different. Perhaps you have something akin to a degree, but you do not in fact have a degree, or you simply would have said so. This is a silly example, and I sincerely hope that no accredited university would confer a higher-level degree on someone who would use the second sentence, but it illustrates my point. If you use ‘like’ like a lot, you don’t like sound all that like intelligent.

Equally irritating is the tendency to replace ‘like’ with ‘you know.’ Even though this might mask the irritating recurrence of ‘like,’ do not be deceived. It is simply a variation on the same stall tactic. I am appalled by how often I hear something along the lines of “I just, like, decided to, you know, [action verb] and, like, you know...” No, sorry. I don’t know. Perhaps you might care to complete your thought, and then we can determine what I do and do not know.

 But all hope is not yet lost. With careful attention and effort, any English speaker can help to combat the spread of this dialectal disease. If you simply focus on not using ‘like’ as a filler word, you will find that the habit is actually quite easy to break. Rather than saying ‘like’ to buy time or to fill empty space in conversation, simply say nothing. Initially, it will seem awkward to find yourself suddenly bereft of a catch-all pause word, and you will certainly be tempted to slip back into the pattern. But after a few weeks of being ‘like’-free, you too will begin to notice the maddening regularity with which everyone around you uses the word. You might not yet be on David Foster Wallace’s level of Snootitude, but at least you will give that poor Stradivarius one less nail to pound.