Misusing word leads to mass ignorance

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Column by Austin Hill

I like the word like, like really, I don’t totally hate it. I actually use it when I am referring to the likeness something contains with another item that is indeed like it, sharing characteristics or as another way of saying such as.

The problem with the word like is it has become a word is substituted for awkward pauses when someone is looking for their point when speaking. It is the new synonym for the word um. It is like, ripping the fingernails off my hands while dragging me across a chalkboard, and I like, can’t take hearing it anymore.

I have no idea where this trend started. For all I know it could have been some bleach-blonde-bubbly-bimbo smacking her gum, talking about prom dates or pudding squares.

Maybe the misuse of the word came from a group of stoners lying in a basement following that white rabbit down the hole, watching a deck of cards move across the ceiling while transforming their twisted psyche into a pile of marshmallows.

Or maybe it was just some poor uneducated writer who forgot to use the spell-check and typed a double negative, now the like phenomenon has spread like a wildfire.

Every time I’m sitting in a class where someone is called upon to answer a question and the word like comes rifling out of their mouth like a machine gun, I want to tear my own face off.

Or when I am out shopping for something and the person who is supposed to be helping me gets caught in their like, train of thought, it’s the worst thing ever…

While doing research for this article I noticed other articles have been published on this topic and how it is a problem in America. But, there has been no success in stopping this like-ness.

We live in a world that sounds like a bunch of idiots, and they are taking over.

Because when you are beat to death with their like’s and bad grammar, it seeps into your mind and all of a sudden, when you are speaking correctly to someone, out of nowhere it drops itself out, and before you know it your talking like a jackass.

I’m not saying people who use like all the time are jackasses, just that horses are like donkeys, but they are different or unlike each other, and if you use the word like all the time you might, like, get it. I cannot do anything in public but grind my teeth and clinch my fist when I hear it.

I will soon make good on tearing my face off, but I can only do it once, so I have to pick my battle.

In a classroom setting though I would hope an instructor would correct a student who uses the word like 13 times while trying to give a sentence long explanation for why frogs are sometimes green.

We are in a learning environment where people’s intelligence is supposed to be held accountable, has this become so common that even educators are allowing this idiocracy to perpetuate?

An instructor would after all deduct points off a paper turned with like rippled through it like a bag of chips.

In fact, I dare to say that if 70 percent of students wrote the way they talked, they would all receive failing grades, so why allow it in the classroom?

Maybe it’s like easier to allow the misfortunes of others to keep reproducing like rabbits, so we can like have something to make fun of, and I can like have a reason to tear my face off.