Like Society

Have you noticed the word like making its irritating permanence in our vocabulary? It is almost completely synonymous with said. Everybody sounds like a valley girl when they talk. And this bugs the hell out of me.

Among other uses, like can be used informally to indicate dialogue as reported speech, which indicates uncertainty. In this sense, we don't really know what we're quoting, just that something similar was said. Another use of the word is for comparison, and in contrast to the word is, also indicates uncertainty. At best, what we're saying resembles our true intentions.

In our culture's ongoing war over the human mind, we are continually losing. Information comes from everywhere and there is so much to filter out that we often don't. We remember what we must and store the rest as vague memory. It's a stretch to imply that a simple misuse of a single word is the source of all our society's crises, so naturally I'm not implying this at all. I'm identifying a symptom of an overall problem: spreading the resemblance of information is not the same as spreading information.

This minor subconscious gaffe is not a source; it is an indicator. One of many. And it seeps into our society only to soften our foundation of knowledge. So please, watch what you say.