Like, Shoot Me

Working for a grad school test prep company I had to talk to a lot of law school hopefuls over the phone. While the occasional student I spoke with really impressed me with their phone rapport, it was far more common for me to have to argue and negotiate with students who used the ubiquitous "like" to fill the gaps and pauses in their sentences. Every time I spoke to these darling students I couldn't help thinking, "And you want to be a lawyer?" Imagine the court room scenario, your key witness just got thrown out and you plead with the judge, "Like that's not fair, he's only like the most important person we have to like support our like case." Who do you think is going to win that case?

I remember in my undergrad I took this class, "A World of Heroes". It was a literature class about all sorts of stuff boys like - Arabian Knights, Don Quixote, and Sir Lancelot. One day our professor asked for a synopsis of the assigned reading and this student in my class volunteered. Mid-sentence the professor cuts him off and says, "Stop. Ok, now start over without using the word like." The student got so flustered he turned bright red then stopped talking altogether. His inability to cut the word 'like' out of his vocabulary paralyzed him to a big ball of 'like' goo.

Living in Florence now I hear American students out my window, in the streets, and in panino shops filling the air with their trilly likes. Christopher Hitchens did a great article for Vanity Fair on the word like that sums up the cultural phenomenon and usage of the word. In it he says, "But I realize that it [like] can’t be expelled altogether. It can, however, be pruned and rationed, and made the object of mockery for those who have surrendered to it altogether." Maybe playground ridicule isn't the way to go, but a simple wake-up call to those with such a handicap may necessary. For their own sake.