- "I'm sure I say 'like' a lot," says Liza Sutherland,
28, a sixth-grade humanities teacher in New York. "I don't worry so
much about how my students speak."
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- In Suzanne Loudamy's house, the word "like"
is under siege.
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- When her 18-year-old daughter, Sarah, speaks, Loudamy
holds up her hands to count how often the word leaves her mouth.
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- "My mom talks about how it's not, like, professional
and says I'll look stupid," says Sarah Loudamy. "But someday
everybody my age will be in the professional world with me. If they're
saying 'like,' too, I won't stand out."
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- Two decades after the song "Valley Girl" popularized
it, a fresh effort is afoot to stamp out this linguistic quirk.
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- The generation that grew up saying "like" is
hitting adulthood " and the work force.
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- As a result, it is now in the lexicon of investment bankers,
doctors and even teachers, where it can sound especially jarring.
-
- "I'm sure I say 'like' a lot," says Liza Sutherland,
28, a sixth-grade humanities teacher in New York. "I don't worry so
much about how my students speak."
-
- Like a verbal virus, this usage is also increasingly
spreading to other English-speaking countries.
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- British and Canadian kids now grease their sentences
with the word.
-
- Sali Tagliamonte, professor of linguistics at the University
of Toronto who has researched the speech of the elderly in the United Kingdom,
found that they, too, have a surprising fondness for "like."
-
- "If I showed you a written document of the conversation,
you would think they were young women in North America, not 78-year-old
ladies from Scotland," she says.
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- LIKES, DISLIKES
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- The battle, of course, isn't being waged against traditional
uses of "like" " the ones that express an affinity ("Mikey
Likes It") or compare two things ("My love is like a red, red
rose").
-
- What's targeted is the repetition of "like"
that to critics sounds like nonsense. Example: "Like, my mother is,
like, a total space cadet." (From the lyrics to "Valley Girl.")
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- Linguists say "like" has a growing number of
meanings. It can act as a "hedge," to tell the listener what
is being said is an approximation or an exaggeration. (Example: "She
has, like, a gazillion shoes.")
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- It can also be a "focuser," to declare that
the next bit of information is important. ("He is, like, so hot.")
-
- One of its most ubiquitous uses is as a substitute for
"said." ("So my mom was like, 'Do your homework.' And then
I was like, 'I did it at school.' ")
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- There are several tactics to combat all this. Some parents
mimic their kids and "like" them right back. Fed-up English teachers
are turning their classrooms into "like"-free zones.
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- Even speech pathologists are being called in to help
break the habit, at rates of as much as $100 an hour. One common tactic:
tape recording or videotaping the afflicted as a kind of shock therapy
to show them how "like"-infused they really are.
-
- In one exercise at Leap Learning Systems, a language
school in Chicago that offers after-school and summer programs to help
inner-city kids master "standard business English," students
are asked to shout "beep beep" whenever a speaker in the class
uses "like," among other words, unnecessarily.
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- Katie Schwartz, a speech pathologist in Chattanooga,
Tenn., has a more Pavlovian technique. Her "Sense Cues" kit trains
speakers to associate the smell of something they don't like with remembering
to delete superfluous "likes" from their conversation.
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- When the "likes" start spilling from the mouths
of Vickie Bunting's students, she writes their sentences on the blackboard
and has them read the words back.
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- "It will click, and they'll see it doesn't mean
anything," says Bunting, who teaches high-school English in Lubbock,
Texas.
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- OLD, NEW
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- Language watchers offer various theories to explain the
spread of "like." Some blame declining emphasis on grammar instruction
in schools. Others point to an explosion of slang in music and movies,
making nontraditional speech more widespread and acceptable.
-
- Defenders of the practice argue that these usages are
just a natural evolution of the English language. Indeed, even some linguists
say the word can be downright useful. When dropped into the middle of a
sentence, for example, it gives the speaker time to gather her thoughts
so she doesn't say the first (sometimes insipid) thing that comes to mind.
Studies also show that people who have learned not to use filler words
are interrupted more often and tend to use simpler sentences.
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- "It really is a wonderful, useful word," says
Muffy Siegel, an associate professor of English at Temple University in
Philadelphia, who has studied the use of "like."
-
- Valley Girls weren't the first group to find some other
uses for "like." Jazz musicians and beat poets used it as a filler
word in the 1950s " as a substitute for 'um' " according to linguists.
In the late-1970s in Southern California, the word for the first time started
turning up, in popular form, to introduce a thought or bit of speech.
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- This form of "like" was unveiled to youth culture
with the song "Valley Girl" by Frank Zappa and his then-13-year-old
daughter, Moon Unit. A decade later, "like" with a form of the
verb "to be" was voted the phrase "most likely to succeed"
by the American Dialect Society, a group that studies American English.
-
- And succeed it has, judging by the frequency with which
it still pops up in conversations. In a University of Alberta study, which
involved 30 Americans ranging in age from 14 to 69, a couple of the participants
used the word more than 100 times in a half-hour conversation.
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- The study found, while younger people used it more often,
all age groups employed the Valley-girl-type "like." Indeed,
while the stereotypical offender may be a 15-year-old suburban girl who
twirls her hair and works at the mall, some studies show boys are now just
as likely to abuse the word.
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- Some of the "like"-dependent just end up reaching
a compromise of sorts. Justin Slay, a 15-year-old in Lubbock, Texas, says
whether or not he uses it depends on whom he is with. "Girls say it
in almost every sentence," Justin says. "I don't say it when
I'm talking to guys."
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- http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/living/8000492.htm
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