Like, OMG, you know?
By Lauren Tsugawa
Yesterday, waiting in a horrendous line at Starbucks, my worst nightmare came to life: I was simultaneously playing Angry Birds on my iPhone and contemplating my delicious caramel macchiato, when I heard the voice of the devil.
"And I was like, ‘What? O-M-G! No way! And then she was all like, ‘I know!' and then, I was like, ‘W T F,' you know?"
Before that moment, I assumed "Valley Girl" dialect from voices at that decibel was only the shenanigans of movies and sitcoms. Apparently not.
Ten unbelievably long minutes later, I received a call from a friend, almost yelping with joy for any distraction from the girls' now even shriller conversation.
"Thank God you called me," I blurted into the phone. "There are these girls in line in front of me. They're like...from ‘Mean Girls' or something, you know?"
Suddenly I froze. Had I just said "They're like" and "you know" in the same sentence?!
Coined by Clark Wellington, speechwriter for former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, as "vagueness," the use of "like" as a space-filler has infiltrated our generation's ever-evolving form of the English language. A "linguistic virus," according to Wellington, the word "like" has lost all meaning and now exists merely as verbal garbage.
Additionally, Wellington argues that our generation lacks verbal conviction. "You know," has replaced the conventional "umm," creating invisible question marks at the ends of our sentences.
According to comedian Taylor Mali, "it has somehow become un-cool to know what you're talking about."
After the "incident" at Starbucks, I realized how often I really did use "like" and "you know" in my everyday conversations.
And it wasn't just me. Everyone around me uses verbal garbage, too! Phrases such as, "And I guess it's like, hard to understand, you know?" had somehow wriggled their way into my mainstream speech, and I didn't even notice.
I attribute our sudden and seemingly irreversible lack of conviction to text messaging, AIM, Facebook and any other form of social networking. "Of course she's going to blame Facebook," you may be thinking, but these mediums all allow for quick jolts of messages, ways for us to have conversations without actually having conversations.
Texts and wall posts are sent and received so quickly, there's no need for capital letters or even punctuation.
I'm not saying we should stop texting or tweeting, because believe me, I love all those things. We just need to think about what we say before we say it, and be conscious of our convictions, or lack thereof.