A friend of mine recently told me about a literary journal started at the University of Virginia in which a column entitled “War on Words” takes issue with a certain detestable, overused or elementary word in the English language each week.
“An interesting concept,” I thought, spacing out in my economics class one day, with odd visions of becoming the next William Safire (at least in one respect) dancing through my head. I looked around at the wordy t-shirts of some of my fellow classmates. The back of one guy’s bright orange, faux-cowboy blouse stated “Live to Fcuk, Fcuk to Live.” The shirt alone had me pretty down about linguistic evolution for a while.
But worse was when I realized that not a single person in my weblog-based English class could communicate any of their points on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness without saying “like” at least 10 times in our class discussion. Once I started looking for it, it seemed like the class had conspired against my personal little language study.
In the last sentence I used the word “like” in its proper context, affording me the ability to bring my classmates’ conspiracy up for debate. If someone were to disagree with my allegation of such a conspiracy, I have the word “like” to defend me, in that I did not actually say it was a conspiracy, but that it was similar to one. I do not actually think that my classmates are plotting against me.
However, any number of years ago, someone was the first to use the word “like” in the following context: “I was, like, so happy when he called me last night.” The overabundance of this word drives me crazy, because it reflects a lack of confidence that suffocates communication in primary schools, colleges and the real world.
Dumbing down sentences with faux-similies is tantamount to watering down what would otherwise be a strong drink. But we’re not talking about drinks. We’re talking about language, which is the basis of nearly all relationships and interactions between humans.
Feeding the worldwide disease of political correctness, which is appropriate in diplomatic contexts, “like” is taken overboard in everyday conversation. Of course people are afraid to say what they think, lest it land them in court or on the 5 o’clock news. I often hesitate when I say someone is “black” or “Arab” or “gay,” afraid that these terms may offend someone, even though they are suitable descriptions. I’ve probably used the word “like” as a prefix in these cases, just to be safe.
In the future, we should all speak with confidence, without ‘like,’ and make the world a stronger, albeit less ‘likeable’ place.
