Val-girl [sic] "like"

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

Well, "teenaged girls" and "Val-girls" are not the same thing by any means. 
But the accuracy of labelling the supposedly "new" (which of course they are 
not) uses of "like" as "Val-girl 'like'" is not really the important problem 
here. 

The article that she refers to (which she sent in an attached file that set 
off a virus warning) "explains" (albeit somewhat jocularly) that the author 
fined her children and then "started hitting" them for using "like" in ways that 
she did not approve of--and then sanctioned them hitting themselves (and each 
other, and their own children in the future)--as punishment for their use of 
this linguistic form. 

How and wny she chooses to discipline her children behind closed doors--so 
long as she doesn't break any laws--is her own business. But when she goes 
public with her behavior--and engages the subject of the language--that is another 
story. Her article says:

"We have started hitting the kids when they use 'like' in any of its 
misbegotten forms: a replacement for 'say', a replacement for 'as', an unnecessary 
interjection that seems to promise a metaphor but instead reveals a stunted 
education and an effete imagination."

This is not an "explanation," it is simply an assertion of unexplained 
prejudices.

Fitzpatrick has a right to her prejudices. She even has the right, 
apparently, to "smack" her children if their linguistic behavior does not meet with her 
approval. We have a right, though, to contest the arrogant and ignorant value 
judgments that she has sent to ADS-L. 

There is no basis--other than her own "stunted education and effete 
imagination"--for making such "chronically aghast" pronouncements. At worst, linguistic 
change is just that, change--and nothing more. In this case, however, all 
three of the uses of "like" that she sees as a sign of "assault by barbarians" 
seem to have perfectly sound linguistic reasons for having emerged in English. 

If she would listen to her children, rather than hitting them, she might 
learn something.



In a message dated 3/3/04 4:57:08 PM, grendel.jjf at verizon.net writes:


> 
> Yeah, but teenaged girls have like raised to like a higher modality. Curbing 
> it is like indeed my matter, and I y'know sorta explain it in the like 
> article that was sooo cited in my post.
> 
>   
> 
>  I like sooo remain, sir,
> 
>  Yr like obt svt,
> 
>   
> 
>  Seán Fitzpatrick
> 
>