A few days ago, Morning Edition on National Public Radio featured, among other interesting bits, a discussion with Dr. Muffy Siegel of Temple University, who's spent good money studying the use of "like" in the conversation of teens. I mean, like, you know, it's pretty interesting, but, like, can't we give that $15,000 to, like, someone who needs it for food or something? Like, what the hell? And, like, is it just me, or is there a beautiful, like, irony that somone named 'Muffy' is, like, studying the use of 'like' in teen parlance? Peace. _____________ Youth is the first victim of war - the first fruit of peace. It takes 20 years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only 20 seconds of war to destroy him. -- King Boudewijn I, King of Belgium (1934-1993)
Like, I totally cant believe it!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Like, since, "like" is my favorite word! Like, later!
One time I counted the number of times this girl said "y'know?" The sentences themselves weren't unusually long. She just gave us a couple of sentences about this guy she met over the weekend. It went something like "We were standing there, y'know?' and he y'know comes over and we were all, like, y'know, whoa!" In two normal sentences, she said "y'know?" fourteen times before I stopped her and said "Just pretend we DON'T know and tell the story, okay?" She honestly had no idea what I was talking about. I sure wish I could remember those sentences verbatim. You'd get a kick out of them!
I did a similar thing with a girl saying "Like". She was going on and on and on with, "Like it was like, well, like, well, he didn't care, like. It was, like..." So I said, just tell me what it REALLY was. She didn't get it either.
I often find myself typing "Of course", it annoys me, "in fact" (being another) I have to physically change what I write just to try and cut the repetativeness down. "At the end of the day..." (A real cliche that) you could get really picky and find that us humans tend to follow patterning in accordance to our vocabulary, and our vocabularies are limited by memory, which is limited by space to use for memory etc. I suppose there are a few other ones I use, just I can't think of any.
Ummm...I was ummmm at the ummm...store and ummmm.....I had diarhea. Like it was totally like bithcin, y'know?
Lol! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Buahahahaha..."diarrhea" I did this exercise to try to keep expressions like "like, ummm..., whatever, nevermind, errr..., stuff" out of normal conversations. It was pretty easy, all you do is talk for 5 minutes straight without saying them, or pausing for long periods.
I had to do something similar back in High School as well. It was tough at first but with practice I was finding myself ummm-less.
