In the winter of 1973 we moved to Cold Spring, a small town in central Minnesota where I had recently taken a job. Our kids soon became acquainted with the neighbor kids down the street. We had been there less than a week when Tara, our oldest daughter, says to her younger sister, “Come here once, Karen.”
“Once?” I thought. “Why not twice?”
I soon discovered that it was a local speech custom to attach useless and unnecessary words to the end of perfectly good sentences. Much like Canadians stick an “Eh” at the end of a statement or question. Minnesotans would tack on a “once”, “then” or “hey”.
This is, of course, not all that big a deal and cannot be compared to, say, the Iranians getting a nuclear bomb and wiping out Israel. Nor is it as annoying to certain speech crutches currently in vogue. Repeatedly sticking in “you know” between comments can be distracting and seems to be a common filler for athletes being interviewed by sports reporters. You would think that star baseball or football players who are frequently asked for on camera comments and who make the big bucks would have someone from the team’s media office taking the guy aside and saying, “Look Dwayne, you said ‘you know’ 37 times in that two minute interview yesterday. That makes you sound like a dumb shit and you are a graduate of Notre Dame and make $10 million dollars a year. Can we cut the ‘you knows’ down to perhaps 10 next time around?”
President Obama has a reputation for being a gifted orator, but that depends on whether he is reading his speeches off his teleprompter or not. When he is forced to speak off the cuff things do not go quite so well and he typically sticks in repeated “ah, ah, ahs” in the middle of sentences and phrases. It seems he’s groping for the thought or correct word. I guess that’s why they haul the damn teleprompters everywhere he is going to make even the most unimportant speech.
Some of the stuff that annoys me most is now part of the youth culture propagated by the all-pervasive media. The use of the word “go” as a substitute for “said” when recounting a conversation can be confusing to senior citizens like me. (“So he goes, blah, blah and I go blah, blah, blah and then he goes…..” etc.) In my memory, failing as it is, the verb “go” is not a suitable substitute for “said”.
But, by far the most maddening verbal crutch of recent times is the repeated and unnecessary insertion of “like” into conversation. “Like” is a perfectly useful word but has no place getting stuck excessively and inappropriately into otherwise perfectly fine sentences. Example conversation: “He was like really mad and I was like completely totally like shocked.” You get the drift.
I guess this is not so shocking. Teenagers all watch the same stuff on TV and the same movies and all their heroes talk this way. What really drives me nuts is to hear 40 something celebrities talking like (acceptable usage of the word) teens on Jay Leno or Jimmy Kimmel. My wife used to count the “likes” on those occasions and often could make it to 30 or 35 before I grabbed the remote and switched channels. Don’t these people ever watch one of their own interviews?
YES! I absolutely cringe while listening to teenagers and younger adults speak. Several years ago I taught a Writing class to a group of sixth grade students who were slightly behind their peers. Not only did the ubiquitous “like” pepper their speaking patterns, but it also appeared frequently in their narratives. The Writing and Reasoning text and accompanying workbook we were told to use didn’t even begin to address basic writing skills, so repetitive fillers weren’t on the education agenda. In fact, the prescribed lesson plan was a complete waste of time. Rather than have students write, they spent 45 minutes each day looking at lines of text where they were told to circle misspelled words. After the first week I spent my weekend putting together a new writing program. I made notebooks for each student outlining writing strategies. The notebook included a list of possible prompts for different types of writing, a brief Thesaurus (several students believed it to be type of dinosaur) for commonly used words, a list of transition words and common editing marks so they could learn to correct each other’s work and then revise their own writing. The students grumbled. Many of them had never written a paragraph before (remedial lessons on paragraph writing were needed). Rough drafts were turned in with texting abbreviations and most of the handwriting was illegible. After two months of working with them, the students started actually producing work that was passable. One of the students was so proud of a story he had written that he took it to his homeroom teacher… and I was busted. The writing notebooks I’d made were taken away, I was reprimanded for not following the state-approved curriculum for struggling students and we returned to useless workbooks. My point for making this diatribe is, sadly, to say that with such low expectations from the public education system, the future of public oration looks bleak.