Clark Whelton, from the City Journal, writes a fantastic article on vagueness in language.  “Like,” I mean, “stuff” like this is awesome and “amazing.”  This is “totally” relevant to marketing and how we speak, think, and communicate without even noticing.  It speaks for itself.  I posted some excerpts  below.  For the full article, click the link further down:

Clark Whelton
What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness
The decline and fall of American English, and stuff
Winter 2011

“I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.

Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-forties, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English…Is Vagueness simply an unexplainable descent into nonsense? Did Vagueness begin as an antidote to the demands of political correctness in the classroom, a way of sidestepping the danger of speaking forbidden ideas? Does Vagueness offer an undereducated generation a technique for camouflaging a lack of knowledge?…”

Clark Whelton was a speechwriter for New York City mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani.

The City Journal

For the full article, click on the link below.  You will, “like,” be totally in agreement:

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_1_snd-american-english.html

Thanks, Clark!  You expressed the linguistic frustration I have been experiencing for years with the word, “like.”

Your comments?

Stuart Atkins