Diss ‘Like’: It’s, like, not a verbal tic. It’s an epidemic, symptomatic of our thought-thin, blathering age
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Depending on how you do the math, there are between a quarter-million and a million words in the English language. The 20-volume second edition of The Oxford English Dictionaryboasts north of 291,500 entries. A Texas-based outfit, the Global Language Monitor, puts the number of words at 1,010,649—that’s as of May 24, 2011—and growing at the rate of one new word every 98 minutes. Whatever the count, there are plenty of words to go around.
Of all these hundreds of thousands of words, only one do I hold in contempt. That word is “like”—not the tepid expression of mild appreciation but the parasitic form that now bleeds the mother tongue, marks the user as a dunce, and, were it truly understood, scandalizes our schools.
No word has less meaning or says as much about what has become of education.
It is easy—and fashionable—to dismiss it as a personal pet peeve (a pedagogical hypersensitivity,) a verbal tic (like Tourette’s, a disability that, though embarrassing, calls for accommodation, not correction), or a sophomoric affliction akin to acne—soon to be outgrown and impolite to point out. It amuses others as an endearing aspect of the ingénue who texts through class and surfaces now and again, with hand raised, bursting with earnestness to volunteer that “like, when I, like, think about this, I, like. … ” (“Thank you, Heather,” says the instructor, grateful for any relief from his or her own monotonous monologue.) Then there are those who are merely disdainful, content to ridicule the afflicted, and take it on as part of the sackcloth and ashes that goes with being a teacher. The collective response of the academy: feigned deafness.
But having spent the last 30 years in the company of the possessed, I have come to view “like” as something more pernicious, a kind of carrier, like the flea that brings with it the plague. It is the byproduct of a culture that is loath to set standards, pathologically averse to confrontation, and prostrate in the face of precipitously declining verbal and writing skills. The endless cascade of “likes” is nothing more than the sound of our own collective dereliction, a verbal cue that we care less about our students and more about teaching to the test, conducting perfunctory self-assessments, winning student-evaluation pageants, and maintaining the illusion that all is well—the oral equivalent of grade inflation.
If we have succeeded in leaving no child behind, it is perhaps because we have condemned children to a common cluster of mediocrity, like, you know, unable to speak, and worse yet, unaware of the severity of their impediment. It is a form of cruelty, a velvet noose they will forever wear around their necks as they venture out into the world, presenting themselves in job interviews, addressing clients, patients, judges, customers, and peers, reminding one and all with whom they come into contact that, notwithstanding a diploma and high GPA, they have failed and, worse yet, we have failed them.