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Friday 15 December 2017

We heard it in like – a café

A cold day found us sitting in a café where there were only two other people. Two young women, probably university students from the gist of their conversation. Was it a conversation though? Hard to tell. It came over as a jumble of disjointed phrases and sentences stitched together with the word ‘like’.

Mrs H and I both wondered how often they used the word. I began counting because it was that kind of day but there were so many it all felt rather silly, almost a parody. I looked round for a camera but knew there wasn’t one. This was for real and they can vote.

I counted like – six times a minute.

6 comments:

Demetrius said...

If you add other four letter words, now in common use, I did say common, we have the New Englich. Like, oh that I just made a spel ****.

Anonymous said...

Listening to people chatting on their mobiles or in the street or a cafe is one of the few pleasures left to an old fogie. The young have been taking the world to hell in a handcart ever since like 2000BCE but we don't seem to have arrived - quite.

Sackerson said...

Back to the '50s/60s, then:

http://wwwcdn.printmag.com/wp-content/uploads/MAD-bks-014.jpg

Clacket said...

Forget the censorious moral component. Since I was quite young, a little while ago, I recall being fascinated by how accents and patterns of speech were made. Or, rather, made themselves. You could, just say, always tell an American from an RP speaker and both from various stripes of northerners. All, and many others, were demonstrably speaking roughly the same language in outline, but nuances would be lost on an outsider. Eventually, as clearly happens historically, they spiral off into different and mutually incomprehensible ‘species’. Must of course have some real parallels with evolution generally.

The other great but by no means original (not many are) thought I thunked many years ago was that if you can’t express it, you probably can’t actually feel, much less think it. In the back of my mind, I dimly recall reading a lament by Montesquieu (I think!) for his dead friend. Written with such moving delicacy and amazingly clear-headed sensitivity, God knows how many years ago, in a world of what we might term unremitting brutality and cruelty. But so much better, truer, than we can do in these noisy, pampered and supposedly sensitive days. His command of language in effect made him able to think more; very much a chicken and egg thing.

The ‘like’ thing: As possibly in ‘…So I said to him, like, are you trying to make my face pregnant now?’ (I recently overheard this tantalising snatch of conversation outside my office window). And the rising inflexion at the end of a sentence, like you know? You will probably be familiar with the current tale of the ballsy young girl who to her fantastic credit stood up to the gruesome bullies at Wilfred Laurier University. Even she does it. It’s kind of strangulated, repressed, anxious for peer approbation…but you know what I mean, like?

Scrobs. said...

Weren't the original beatniks usually saying 'kindalika'?

Seem to remember that, but then they grew younger and became hippies.

A K Haart said...

Demetrius - can't like work that one out like.

Roger - no, I don't think we have arrived and the journey so far is not like, encouraging.

Sackers - I used to enjoy the magazine and the books - probably still would today.

Clacket - "if you can’t express it, you probably can’t actually feel, much less think it."

My school physics teacher used to say that if you don't understand something in a book then the person who wrote it probably didn't understand it either. Much the same as your idea and I'm sure it is generally so. Incoherent speech may disguise incoherent thinking which also allows more freedom for the emotions.

Scrobs - I seem to remember something like that like.