“Dude, Like…”

I have a really bad problem with saying like. I do it compulsively. I used to be one of those people who prays really fast and says “God” every fifth word or so. Now the same tick has invaded all of my speech with “like”, but strangely I don’t do it when I pray anymore. Go figure. My friends don’t really ever say anything about it, probably because a lot of them do it themselves. But sometimes people make mention of it – my brother-in-law, for instance, is fascinated by it – and whenever they do I just get self-conscious about it and it gets way worse. It seems like it always nips any attempts at smoothness in the bud, and I wonder sometimes if that’s exactly the point, that I (and the rest of us) are just so convinced that confidence is a sham and a fake, that we launch a pre-emptive strike against all phoniness by sabatoaging our speech across the board. At any rate, this is getting too personal, so I’ll just share this passage I came across in Terry Eagleton’s After Theory the other day that seems to be a shockingly acute diagnosis.

For this strain of postmodernism, claiming that one position is preferable to another is objectionable ‘hierarchical’….A certain postmodern fondness for not knowing what you think is perhaps reflected in the North American speech habit of inserting the word ‘like’ after every three or four words. It would be dogmatic to suggest that something actually is what it is. Instead, you must introduce a ritual tentativeness into your speech, in a kind of perpetual semantic slurring. (103-104)