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Since it's Friday, we'll begin the day with a non-political digression on language. I've been meaning to put together my thoughts on this story that came out a couple of weeks ago from Britt Peterson of the Boston Globe on the "quotative like," the now-common use in which the word "like" indicates someone saying something, as in, "I was like, no way." It drives lots of people nuts, but the message from America's linguists is, tough luck. Not only has it spread to every English-speaking country on earth, it isn't going anywhere:
As the recent studies show, the spread of both flavors of "be like" is a result of the phrases' dazzling variety of uses. "I'm like," in particular, has clearly taken firm root, with even Michelle Obama using it recently on "The Tonight Show" to talk about the problems of going out on a date with the president's entire motorcade: "He's like, 'I'm going to take you, and we're going to go out on a romantic dinner.' And I'm like, 'Is the ambulance coming?'" As Cukor-Avila said, "I tell my students, eventually all the people who hate this kind of thing are going to be dead, and the ones who use it are going to be in control."
I understand why some people find the quotative like grating. It's because it originated with young people, and older people are often bothered by new language uses that come from the young. It makes them feel, well, old. And out of touch. And on their way out.
The question this raises for me is, when is it reasonable to condemn a new linguistic development like this one? It's obviously absurd to say that English should be frozen in all the terms and usages that were common whenever you happened to have grown up; language is constantly changing. To hold otherwise is to be an insufferable fuddy-duddy. On the other hand, there are some usages or expressions that there are good reasons to denounce.
For instance, my personal linguistic pet peeve is the expression "I could care less," which some time in the last couple of decades all but replaced its antecedent, "I couldn't care less." The reason it infuriates me is that when you say "I could care less" you're actually saying not just something other than what you mean, you're saying the opposite of what you mean. Although I understand that I've lost the battle on this one, I'm going to keep saying "I couldn't care less," even if eventually it marks me as some kind of weirdo.
In this case, I think I have a perfectly good case that the old expression is better than the new expression. You could argue that everyone understands that when you say "I could care less" you actually mean the opposite of what you're saying, and you'd be right, but at least I have a sound reason for my position. And that's what most language complaints lack. For instance, if "I was like" to mean "I said" bothers you, can you offer a reason why, beyond, "That's not how people should talk"? Probably not.
The danger, however, is that if we're too open-minded, and say that since English is a gloriously evolving system where anything goes, we'll lose our willingness to say that some words and expressions are better than others, because of how they describe an idea, or even just how they sound. It would be no fun if you greeted every newly minted word with a thumbs-up just because we want to let a thousand language flowers bloom. For example, when Sarah Palin invented the word "refudiate," the problem was that she just meant to say "repudiate"-it wasn't some new idea that incorporated elements of both refuting and repudiating. She uses it just to mean repudiate, as in deny, denounce, etc., and not to mean refute, as in make an argument in opposition to. And, of course, instead of just saying "I made a mistake-who doesn't when talking sometimes?" she asserted that she meant to say that all along, which was plainly ridiculous.
It's true that we still associate "I was like…" with the informal speech of younger people, and you wouldn't use it in something like a news article ("Today, President Obama announced a new national security strategy. He was like, 'America faces many threats'..."). But in and of itself that doesn't make it problematic. In fact, it's even a little richer than "I said" because it evokes a meeting of feeling and language-"I was like" isn't just about what came out of your mouth, it also implies a state of mind.
Anyhow, thinking about this has reminded me that the impulse to sneer at new usages just because people like you didn't come up with them is usually wrong, unless you can come up with a good reason to do so. But I still reserve my right to get mad at "I could care less."
I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
