- "It is all part of what she sees as the infantilisation
of American society, in which linguistic habits - along with much else
-- are passed up from children to parents, rather than the other way around."
-
- LOS ANGELES -- A few years
ago, Maggie Balistreri overheard a conversation on a train so ludicrously
over-peppered with the word "like" that she started taking notes.
Not "like" as in, "I like you", but rather the irritating
filler that, since the advent of the Valley Girl in the 1980s, has become
prevalent in American speech patterns. You know, like, whatever.
-
- Since Ms Balistreri is a performance artist - as well
as a gifted and witty poet - she tried to reproduce the conversation out
loud once she got home, but found that some uses of "like" were
easier to emulate than others.
-
- Soon she was categorising different types and came up
with no fewer than nine of them. For example, the vague like ("This
was back in, like, October"); the self-effacing like, where the speaker
does not want to sound too virtuous ("I, like, care about the environment
and stuff"); or the betrayer like, a signpost to utter insincerity
("Oh this is, like, so not an imposition!")
-
- There is the undercutting like, used to introduce some
modestly uncommon piece of knowledge without making the speaker sound too
pompous ("That's, like, an umlaut. Or something.") The apology
like, where the word acts as an admission of complete inarticulateness
("I was, like, wow!"). Or the staller like, the verbal equivalent
of a thought bubble reading "Think, brain, think!" (Example:
"You're from Belize? That's, like... south!")
-
- These and other uses have just been collected in Ms Balistreri's
book The Evasion English Dictionary, which serves as a deliciously revealing
catalogue of the tics of contemporary chit-chat and also as a personal
manifesto pleading for plain, literate talk stripped of "shibboleths
of shamming ... that American dodge of a dialect I call Evasion-English".
-
- To her, the Valley Girl talk that has now become alarmingly
prevalent among adults as well as teenagers is not just an indication of
linguistic sloppiness, but actually something more underhand. "Whether
daft or deft, we use these words to duck the truth," she wrote.
-
- Again and again in the workplace - by day she is a freelance
proofreader and copy editor - she has encountered insincere blather in
the form of phrases like "I see where you're coming from", or
"It's a good point", which are just a cover for something less
flattering. "There is a tendency in our culture to avoid arguing or
disagreeing," she says. "It doesn't come from politeness, it
comes from vanity, or arrogance. We never want to be wrong. And, in the
process, we avoid saying anything."
-
- In her book, Ms Balistreri identifies 11 different uses
of "whatever", running the gamut of concealed emotion from jealousy
to apathy by way of scepticism, impatience, self-pity and disapproval masquerading
as indifference.
-
- And she has enormous fun replacing various evasive words
with ones more properly conveying the emotion at hand. When couples refer
to "the relationship", for example, they would almost always
be more honest to say "you". As in: "I just don't feel like
I'm getting what I want from the relationship".
-
- Her brilliant exegesis of the word "like" remains
the centrepiece of the book. She has even performed it in public, in bars
and poetry clubs in Manhattan where she lives - quite possibly making her
the first person to turn a dictionary into a piece of comic theatre. She
cites Cuvier's theory that from a single bone a scientist can construct
an entire animal, and suggests that "like" is the English language's
very own Cuvier's bone, "our culture's telling trifle... from which
the less sterling aspects of our character can be constructed".
-
- You could call her a word shrink, someone capable of
unmasking whole layers of hidden meaning in a seemingly trifling interjection.
It's a description she relishes, because she loves to rail against the
psychobabble of self-help books and contemporary therapy which, in her
view, validate many of the linguistic evasions instead of exposing them.
-
- It is all part of what she sees as the infantilisation
of American society, in which linguistic habits - along with much else
-- are passed up from children to parents, rather than the other way around.
"We have a cult of parents who want to be cool in the eyes of their
kids, so they copy the speech of the kid," she said. "I think
it is corrupt and pathetic. And with it comes inarticulate speech because
a kid isn't fully formed ... To overvalue the way a kid speaks is a lie
in itself."
-
- 'The Evasion English Dictionary' is published in the
US by Melville House
-
- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
-
- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=468574
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