A Literally Epic (DIS-) Like - Good morning everyone! - To be perfectly fair, we too had our favorites, linguistically speaking, when we were growing up. However, what we keep encountering here lately is a truly ridiculous cluster bunch of quite deliberately alienated words. Not just teens but also folks in their 20s, 30s and older seem to be enjoying to engage words in their everyday speech that simply do not fit at all contextually. What happened to the once rather insignificant word LIKE, I wonder? All of a sudden the rediscovered lexeme LIKE was elevated and put on a lexical pedestal. Gradually LIKE was plugged into every other sentence until it not only rearranged the natural English word order for real but scrambled it up entirely. LIKE, completely re- invented, may now be squeezed in anywhere, no matter where. Quite apparently, some people have taken such great liking to its multiple use that LIKE can easily occur up to five times in just one sentence. Just the other day, I was listening to a college graduate speaking rather mystifyingly. "Like, I ... like couldn't like express like what I like wanted to say." Wow! What exactly was it that she wanted to say? Why a word like LIKE is generally used that excessively today indeed remains a mystery to me. Anyway, this short shallow statement presented in this so well- rehearsed vocal fry made it all sound so much more stupid. EPIC failure, I would assume, were that girl doing that in a job interview. By the way, is the true meaning of the word EPIC known at all? I doubt it, but since the peers all use it regardless of whether it makes sense or not, why even bother resisting, right? Listen though, it's really starting to get on people's nerves. Not just saying this but meaning it, LITERALLY! Any idea about the Latin derived word litera, literae at all? Among other meanings, this word stands for letter like the letter(s) of the alphabet. Got it, all you parrots out there? A long time ago I learnt that the jargon or lingo was necessary to socially bond when grouping. Everybody wants to fit in and therefore loves to linguistically become one with the clique. All good as long as language itself does not take a beating to the point that the lexical level no longer meets the contextual one. The more words are ripped out of their original contextual surroundings and deliberately exiled and thus mis- used, the more likely the English language will eventually undergo massive and irreversible changes - not necessarily to the best, though. Some woman I talked to a while ago cut right to the chase of the problem when comparing nowadays generation to a bunch of kids in grown- up bodies. I would love to know, how English teachers generally get around lexical amputees such as fav, reno, repo, legit, acronyms like ASAP, BTW, TGIF, LMAO and stupidly enriched non- sense sentences. Isn't it high time to finally return to the good old book as to rediscover the real sense of how to utilize words correctly? Realistically speaking, this is pretty unlikely to ever happen even though it is in fact high time for change. Nevertheless, I would like to encourage young adults, especially college and university graduates, to pick an elaborate word every other week or month and implement it lexically and contextually correctly. This can and will at some point be quite a challenge, but at the same time it will slowly prove how smartly and sophistically the English language can still be put to its fullest use. Just another thought to save a beautiful language.
College or no college - That's the question Now the time is here again for high school graduates to venture off to college and university. I still, to this day, remember being thrilled and overly excited to start as a fresh(wo)man in a new place where studying would go hand in glove with partying for the next few years. I love to see every one's kids swarm out and flock together in college districts and on student campus terrains. Most teenagers get accepted somewhere even though often at second or third choice sites, but they will all have to face one and the same question which is, at what price? Unless you are granted a scholarship, three years and plus of college education costs you an arm and a leg, and if you keep going for more profound specialization, you will be in debts up your neck by the time you have got your PhD. Then what? Go and spit out job applications like a ball machine hoping that someone is going to hire you - unless of course you were lucky eno...
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