Lots to ‘like’ in Cameron Diaz

“What are you doing watching that program, Art?”

“It’s strictly for educational purposes, my dear.”

That was the exchange earlier this week when my wife asked me to turn down the volume of my “educational” program, Entertainment Tonight. Not highbrow enough? Well, let me explain:

Purely for education and edification, I left the TV on after the evening news, enjoying a passive education and nodding occasionally, between my own nodding off.

“I’m doing research for my next column,” I told Mdm. Light Sleeper, who usually sacks out at 9. And so it was educational. But let’s back up a bit.

Remember the derriere pose by Jennifer Lopez and Cameron Diaz, photographed together during the Oscars? The pose, which has appeared in several magazines, shows the women facing away from the camera then simultaneously, turning their heads toward the camera to be recognized.

The pose, I’m quite convinced, is available to voyeurs on YouTube. Now the educational part of this scenario is strictly for scholarly research. You see, I wasn’t really interested — at my age — in the cheesecake aspects of the photo; no sir, I wasn’t really concerned about looking at Diaz’s and Lopez’s remarkable physical attributes; rather, I watched solely to become educated, to learn more about language.

Entertainment Tonight showed several stage and screen celebrities. TV reporters approached some of the stars, asking their impressions of the awards. But suddenly, as a camera crew went up to Diaz and Lopez, their backs to the camera, the two turned their heads in unison.

One reporter asked whether that synchronized body movement had been choreographed. Indeed it had been. This is how Cameron Diaz so eloquently expressed it:

“We were messing around during rehearsal and we were like, we we’re like ‘what are we gonna do?’ and we just started like kind of like hanging out and they were like here and we were like, ‘we should totally just like and they weren’t ready for it, ya know, and so we were like ‘1, 2, 3 and we were like (giggle).”

Take a moment to grasp the profundity of Cameron Diaz’s unfathomable contribution to the canon of lofty language. It’s totally underwhelming.

I like both Diaz and Lopez and concede both celebrities are, like, fine actresses, easy on the eyes; they look great in evening dresses, but they, like, don’t do much to elevate the level of communication.

The trouble is that people with such visibility and recognizability often get listened to more than the average person. Would somebody unattractive, unsexy like even get noticed by a TV camera operator?

Does the state of today’s typical conversations owe a debt to movie and TV stars, who are much more visible than the regular masses? Remember, celebrities’ words and opinions and their own version of erudition ostensibly carry more weight. In just a couple of sentences which took Diaz about 10 seconds, our language is like enriched by nine instances of “like.”

What is it about “like” that makes it such a favorite, not only of teens but also of established, 30-ish glitterati? Part of “like’s” popularity might be that it serves as multiple parts of speech. “I like that” contains a verb; “they were like brothers” makes it a preposition; I felt like I had been kicked” makes it an adverb; “the like(s) of which” makes it a noun; and it becomes an adverb (again) in expressions such as “She enters the room and wonders, ‘Like where is everybody?’”

Like it or not, for years, as a speech teacher, I cautioned students against using “forbidden words,” which serve merely as filler. Listen to ordinary people and note the frequency of “I mean,” “ya know,” “let’s see,” “what else?” and that wretched “like.” Doing so might be quite instructive, but the danger in keeping a tally of such words is a tendency to disregard the message due to the unabashed use of such filler.

My older sister Dolores only recently pointed out that I’d used “like” four times in just a few sentences, as I was giving someone directions. Could it be that I’ve unwittingly become the egregious equivalent of Oedipus, who, faced with the plague that beset Thebes, finds out from the Oracle that it was his own fault that the plague descended upon the city?

Why has “like” become like, ya know, the most popular of these expressions?

Occasionally I come across a former student who immediately needs to choose the words carefully. “I remember you as the teacher who wouldn’t let us use ‘ya know,’ you know.” Alas, that’s why we language cops just don’t have any friends, as those we speak to somehow must believe the grade they received in Beginning Speech last millennium is really being held in abeyance, depending on the frequency of forbidden words.

Take heart. As surely as fads come and go, “like” will lose its luster in due time. What will replace it? An expression we hear more and more is “sheesh.” It’s a brief expression that means much.

Although “sheesh” is of fairly recent vintage in my glossary, fellow Optic columnist Lupita Gonzales swears the term’s been around since the early ‘60s.

The beauty of “sheesh” is that it is always directed at someone else. If someone else makes a mistake, it’s proper to sheesh him or her. The term, however, should never be directed at oneself.

So, sheesh, should I kind of, like, ya know, consult an oracle to find out if I am like the cause of the “like” problem?