Like…

Sitting in the cafe at Bath Spa the Sunday before last indulging ourselves in a spot of post-detox lunch (one feels so much more virtuous entertaining a large glass of something white, crisp and chilled when one has just purged oneself for an hour or so in the sultry muculence of the steam rooms!) – the Kickass Canada Girl and I found ourselves sharing the ambience with the group at the next table. We had little choice in the matter since the table in question was occupied by a gaggle of raucous teenage girls!

I suppose it is an established fact that the majority of those who avail themselves of the facilities offered by these temples to the body beautiful are members of the gentler sex. This has certainly been my observation, and at Bath last week there did seem to be a preponderance both of groups of ladies of a certain age – doubtless on other occasions to be found lunching – and of throngs of turbulent teenagers. The Girl offered some pithy thoughts as to why these young shemales might feel the need to be quite so strident but I can’t really repeat them here for reasons of propriety.

Given that it was impossible to avoid overhearing the ‘conversation’ (though it is doubtful that such verbal exhibitionism could ever really be construed as an ‘informal interchange of thoughts, information, etc., by spoken words’ – as the definition has it) I found myself somewhat bemused by what was actually being said. Though the group as a whole seemed only too eager to demonstrate their linguistic limitations, the loudest of the three – the one sitting closest to us, naturally – appeared also to be trying to displace the definite article from its preeminence in the lexicon to be replaced by that which – according to a study by the OED of the Oxford English Corpus – is ranked no higher than fifty fourth.

I refer – of course – to the word – ‘like‘!

The dictionary definition of ‘like‘ runs thus:

      – of the same form, appearance, kind, character, amount, etc.

The Urban Dictionary adds these alternatives:

      – a term used by many junior high and high school students for having a crush.

      – in some teenage girls, a word spoken in between other words in a sentence.

      – the same as “said” or “spoke”.

The first is obvious. An example of the second might be:

      “Like, oh my God, that is, like, so wrong.”

…and the third:

      “So I was like, ‘duuuude’ and he was all ‘baaaabe’.”

Now – listening to someone inserting ‘like‘ between every third or fourth word in a sentence may set the teeth on edge in much the same way as does being subjected to the sound of fingernails on a blackboard – or indeed to the Brummie accent* – but nothing raises my hackles quite as effectively as this latter substitution. If one really must find an alternative to “said” – and is not prepared to do without it entirely – then the InterWebNet will happily furnish some hundreds of possible alternatives. None of them is – ‘was like‘!!

What I find most puzzling, however – given that these self-regarding youths undoubtedly pick up such linguistic tics from their favourite Hollywood movies or TV shows – is that they should have fixated on a meme that is getting on for a decade old.

I didn’t think that Bath was that far from the capital!

* Apologoys ter brummoys fer anny offence. Cor resist a cheap gag!