Between you and me I have a pet peeve with the word “like.” Warning: this column contains 27 misuses of the word “like.” You may have a headache by the end. I did and I was only typing.
When I was young the word “like” was used in short sweet messages—“Do you like me?” “Yes I like you”—not as a filler for sentences such as “I like kind of like you. Do you like kinda like me?”
If you like have no idea like what I’m talking about like you are like lucky!
I wouldn’t even bring this up because I thought it was a valley girl phrase and it would soon be replaced with proper English. But now they are using it in commercials! Just this week I heard this crazy trend being used in both a television commercial for yogurt (a brand I now will never buy) and on a radio spot for a car commercial. Who are these marketing ad executives trying to reach? I thought most of these like abusers “like have no like money.” But then I started listening to interviews with famous people and it has become commonplace to overuse the word like.
This is an actual interview with pop star Justin Bieber: “I don’t know. Like, I wasn’t good in school; I was like okay in school, but I was not like great. I wasn’t getting As. I was like Bs and Cs, so I like wasn’t really focused.” If I were the typist transcribing these interviews I would have to be medicated.
I had some very serious Cook County High School English teachers who would roll over on their dictionaries and thesauruses if they knew of this trend. I am sure that if I had walked into Mrs. Hanson’s 7th grade English class and said “Hey Mrs. Hanson, like did you have like a good like weekend?” She would have had me write a thousand prepositional phrases as punishment.
Mrs. R and Mr. O like wouldn’t have liked it either but they like would have just like told me to like knock it off! And don’t get me started on Mr. Duffy, he already thought most of our parents were married cousins and told us so on a regular basis! One of my favorite TV shows had a scene where the driver of the carpool was so fed up with the “like” trend she fined the children a nickel every time they incorrectly used the word “like.” One of the moms came over to complain about the fine saying “I like think this is like the dumbest idea ever.” She charged her a dime and shut the door. My hero!
It is my uneducated opinion that adding the word like several times to each sentence reduces your perceived IQ by about 30 points. The study has not been completed but I think we should like get the like results as like as soon as like possible…..before we, as a country, are perceived as being like idiots.
The trouble with the
world is that the
stupid are cocksure
and the intelligent are
full of doubt.
Bertrand Russell
Taste of Home columnist Sandy (Anderson) Holthaus lives on a farm in South Haven, MN with her husband, Michael, and their children Zoe, Jack and Ben. Her heart remains on the North Shore where she grew up with her parents, Art and LaVonne Anderson of Schroeder. She enjoys writing about her childhood and mixes memories with delicious helpings of home-style recipes.
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