Several years ago, I made a trade: a bicycle I hardly used for a dachshund. Heidi (what else does one name a weenie dog?) had acquired bad manners, gulping her food, piddling on the carpet when chided and scratching and chewing on wooden items.
My friend, the trader, who lived next door, bought an expensive, kennel-trained Great Dane to teach Heidi some manners. The trainer promised my friend, Bob, that in no time, the bigger dog would set such a good example that Heidi would soon follow suit by eating only with a napkin around her neck, using knife and fork, wearing a pad, chewing each morsel 17 times and eschewing wooden furniture.
You can imagine where that experiment went. Soon both dogs were behaving like Heidi. They growled for their food, wolfed it down, dog-in-the-manger style, and in short, behaved badly. People often imitate the animals.
Let me explain:
I like to think I have three fairly intelligent sons, capable of good English and impervious to the pitfalls that befall the language, words like “like” and “stuff.” Not only do I like to believe they’re articulate, I believe they are.
But take them out of their natural habitat, mix them with other relatives, most of whom are intelligent, college-educated young people, and the rules of grammar, usage and syntax go on vacation.
Here’s an example: One son wants to know what his Denver cousin is up to these days. Rather than asking, simply, “What do you do there?” the question becomes, “Like whaddya do there, and stuff?”
Rather than answering, “I work in a laboratory,” she says, “I’m like a software engineer, like checking items, and stuff like that.” Can I bear to continue listening? The language of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton reduced to “stuff like that.”
In fairness, I like to think my relatives are merely “hanging loose” with language, uttering the first word that comes to mind, even if it’s cliche-ridden. Notice how it’s so much more difficult to be profound when we’re in a hurry? When someone else utters something intelligent, something that puts me in my place, if I’m just then walking out the door, whatever my planned comeback is, I end up saying something unbright — like “whatever.”
Little has changed over the years since I hung up my piece of chalk and my tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. Back in the ‘60s, I wrestled with notions of what would constitute good grammar. I never urged my high school speech students to parade the language with polysyllabic profundity laced with platitudinous ponderosity.
No siree, Bob! Let’s use the vernacular, with the exception of a handful of forbidden words which I must not hear as we compete in the Valley High Speech Tournament. The words are “like,” “stuff,” “I mean,” “let’s see” and “ya know.” One of my more promising speech students, took it upon herself to rehearse the class on what words to avoid in the upcoming tournament.
Accordingly, Jackie said, with pep-rally frenzy, “Let’s get these words out of our system: ‘like,’ ‘stuff,’ ‘I mean,’ ‘let’s see’ and ‘ya know.’” Dutifully, the class repeated the words that make their teacher, Mr. Trujillo, cry.
This overdose, I believed, would become a cure. At the tournament, soon both dogs were behaving like Heidi, or in the speech context, Jackie had simply implanted those words with the result that they became the default words for the otherwise lofty topics they spoke on.
I looked in on our leader, Jackie, expecting to hear great things when it was her turn. But whether it was my presence, or the stage-fright inherent in that kind of competition, Jackie recited the forbidden words, almost all in one sentence.
“Ya know, like, I mean the topic of the, like, electoral college, I mean, is quite complex, and stuff.” Oh, what have we done to the language?
Ya know, use of these forbidden words is somehow related to but not the same as the vowel-less words one pecks in to a cell phone, another topic about which I often rant. Remember that communication through texting has already led to two things: the elimination of the semicolon and the creation of the endless run-on sentence.
I used to imagine that if we used these forbidden words, in a controlled setting, until we became moderately ill, the words would disappear.
Like, I now believe extra exposure to these words conditions the speaker to use them as fillers, whenever a more precise word is lacking, and stuff like that.
Well, Bob and I’s venture into animal training failed, as did my attempts to dictate how high school students in Cuba, N.M., ought to speak.
That was more than 40 years ago. Has anything changed?
• • •
A boss was giving instructions to a new front-office hire. “There are two words that you must never use when speaking to our customers. The first one is “swell’; the other one is “lousy.”
“Got it,” the new employee answered. “So what are the words you don’t want me to use?”
• • •
Did you notice a strange use of the first-person pronoun as a possessive, “Bob and I’s” instead of “Bob’s and my venture”? Though my homeroom teacher at Immaculate Conception School, Sister Mary Kranken Grammatik, would never have approved of such usage, I, like, think it sounds better my way.