Some of my best friends are young people, as are most of my coworkers. Gee, so are my own kids. But I’ve got a problem with the lot. They suffer from — rather, they make me suffer from — likeitis, the habit of inserting “like” into everyday speech once every four or five words.
Likeitis is related to fluffulosis, peppering nonsense words — sorta, kinda, “and stuff”, ya know, um — throughout speech. If conversation were a sandwich, these words are slice upon slice of linguistic Wonder Bread, devoid of flavor and nutrition, denying the listener a tasty and filling dialogue.
The victims are blameless. Just like sagged pants and suffocating clouds of Axe body spray aroma, likeitis emerged as popular fashion, a prerequisite for acceptance into the teen’s peer group. The affliction has become so ubiquitous that a kid caught stringing together uninterrupted nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives would stand out like an exchange student from Stuttgart, leather pants and all.
In spite of my lack of linguistic credentials, I suspect other roots to the problem. Our society has never been more fast-paced, driven by devices moving at light speed, with more information reaching us from a glowing screen than a human voice. Perhaps the likeitis sufferer subconsciously struggles to hold the listener’s attention, fearing that pausing to choose the ideal word might relinquish the virtual microphone. To hold the spotlight, a fifteen-year-old stuffs his talk with verbal dough balls. The gather-my-thoughts pause seems gone forever.
Social likeitis may be inconsequential. For all I know, teen brains are wired to filter out the fluff and isolate the meaning, as one might identify and follow a melody coming from the PA system in a noisy airport.
But those afflicted as teens have trouble curing themselves by their twenties, an age where career advancement might require clear communications. Of course many jobs don’t list oration as a job requirement. But even a graphic designer, spending the day silently converting imagination into images, will still be called upon to explain a project to a colleague or client. “These kinda upward-sweeping lines sorta symbolize your organization’s, like, progress in the, um, marketplace, ya know?” just doesn’t inspire confidence.
How long would you stick with a physician that says, “We kinda received, like, the results of your, ya know, throat culture and it sorta shows you, I guess, have strep throat and stuff, know what I’m saying?”
Hey, older folks (like me), don’t assume you are immune. I know a father old enough to have come of age prior to the likeitis pandemic. Yet he fell victim. Why? In spite of my lack of psychology credentials, I think his teen talk is a frayed lifeline to lost youth. Even if he can’t snowboard like his kids, he can obfuscate an otherwise concise sentence. Regardless, his verbal pretense seems out of place, like pleated Dockers and penny loafers on Shaun White. Save yourselves!
And parents, you can save your kids. A scared-straight form of boot camp for likeitis victims involves reading aloud Ernest Hemingway (the Papa of pithy), wearing belts, and eavesdropping on FCHS hallway conversations while eating liver and onions. Before you know it, your teen will shock you by saying something like, “Hi Mom, school went well today.”
