by
HOWARD RICHLER
______________
Howard Richler is the author of The Dead
Sea Scroll Palindromes,Take My Words, A Bawdy Language, Global
Mother Tongue, and Can I Have a Word with You?
His next book, Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of
Words, will be published by Ronsdale Press in March 2010.
“When
I told him, he got, like, so mad.”
“I
want to get a car that’s really, like, fast.”
“I
know, like, what’s that about anyway? I can’t
believe that she would even, like, say that to you! Like,
I just don’t get some people.”
In promoting my
book Take My Words some years ago, I was the guest
“expert” on several radio call-in programs. The
theme of these programs was the ever popular whinge, “What
are your pet peeves about the English language?” Callers
vented their spleen on their most disliked usages, such as
the word “hopefully,” “I could care less,
”split infinitives, using “who” in place
of “whom,” etc. By and large, I explained that
it was not altogether clear that there was anything wrong
with the usages they loathed. As writer Anthony Burgess said
in his book A Mouthful of Air “the emotions
aroused by group loyalty obstruct the making of objective
judgments about language. When we think we are making such
a judgment, we are merely making a statement about our prejudices.”
The
number one hated usage was the word “like” as
in the trio of examples provided by my peeved listeners listed
at the start of this article. Given that most of the people
who phoned to sound off were over forty, recent research by
University of Toronto linguistics professor Sali Tagliamonte
bears out that the usage of “like” is an age marker.
Her study showed that the use of “like” in telling
a story was found in 65% of 17-19-year-olds, 29% among 30-34-
year-olds, 18% among 35-49- year olds, and 0% among octogenarians.
According to Tagliamonte, the use of “like” to
narrate a story arose in “California in the 1980s and
it gained prestige as a trendy and socially desirable way
to voice a speaker's inner experience.”
However,
the re-creating of language by the young is hardly a new phenomenon.
Connie Eble in Slang and Sociability points out that
even during the Middle Ages when young students flocked to
academies in Paris and Bologna that they changed language
to strengthen group identity and to set themselves apart from
others.
While
I was unable to offer the radio callers any cogent defense
of the viral spread of “like,” many linguists
see nothing wrong with it. Tagliamonte claims that it doesn’t
“reflect stupidity or poor grammar -- it is merely a
recent linguistic fact.” She told me that those students
prone to its use do as well academically as those that do
not. Linguist Marcel Danesi provides an even more spirited
advocacy of “like” in his book Cool: the Signs
and Meanings of Adolescence. Danesi says that while the
liberal usage of “like” is disparaged by many
grammarians, he believes it “actually improves the rhythms
of English by making our language flow in a manner similar
to the Romance languages.” According to Danesi, “like”
is a functional word because it gives the speaker slightly
more time to formulate thoughts.
A
short video at
http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=7375398
underlines the versatility of “like.” It acts
as a “quotative complementizer” that highlights
quotations in a retold conversation, e.g., “She was
like you should totally buy that dress but I wish it came
in black.” Also, it serves as an “approximate
adverb” in expressions such as “It was like 140
degrees. I thought I was going to die.” While the mercury
didn’t reach 140, the use of “like” stresses
that it was unbearably hot. More obviously, it is also considered
a “discourse marker” in introducing similes such
as “he eats like a pig.”
Notice,
however that in the above examples the use of “like”
occurs only once in a statement. Invariably, though we are
assailed by a cacophony of “likes,” like in “I
know, like, what's that about anyway? I can’t believe
that she would even, like, say that to you! Like, I just don’t
get some people.”
And
while this emotive way of talking may have its place and function
among the young, I would hope that it dissipates once a person
becomes a member of a largely non-pre-pubescent workplace.
Perhaps, as Burgess might say, I am merely expressing my own
prejudice, but I believe that by the age of thirty a person
can transcend the rampant use of “like” and be
able to express himself or herself in more nuanced and reasoned
terms.
After
all English possesses the largest vocabulary of any language,
so, like, why not use it?
For
more of Howard Richler at Arts & Opinion:
Can
I Have a Word With You
The Significant Other Conundrum
Yinnglish-Schminglish
The
Oxfordization of Poutine
