According to Ryan Heath in his wonderful Please Just Fuck Off, It's Our Turn Now:
"Besides, young people misuse English as a defence mechanism as much as we do it out of ignorance. I say 'like', 'seriously', and 'literally' as a protection against the lies that are pumped into me from every single angle, every day. We are so unused to truth and transparency and so surrounded by fantasy that we qualify our statements by re-emphasising that our statements are not like those falsehoods. He was 'literally' about to walk in front of a car, because we've all seen a hundred movies where people look like they die, but it's all a trick."
It's an attempt to distinguish between actuality and metaphor, and emphasize a personal experience, pushing it out of the context of the ocean of false, referenced, and simulated experience our lives are part of.
I think we also speak more and more in reference in metaphor - like the social exchanges you can now have completely in family guy quotes - and when you want to get a piece of literal, plaintext, raw information concerning actual physical events that took place, you need to mark that out.
As for 'like', everyone under 34 says 'like'. Who knows why? Hundreds of after school specials from the 70's poisoning our speech with hippy adjuncts as children?
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-06-01 06:53 am (UTC)"Besides, young people misuse English as a defence mechanism as much as we do it out of ignorance. I say 'like', 'seriously', and 'literally' as a protection against the lies that are pumped into me from every single angle, every day. We are so unused to truth and transparency and so surrounded by fantasy that we qualify our statements by re-emphasising that our statements are not like those falsehoods. He was 'literally' about to walk in front of a car, because we've all seen a hundred movies where people look like they die, but it's all a trick."
It's an attempt to distinguish between actuality and metaphor, and emphasize a personal experience, pushing it out of the context of the ocean of false, referenced, and simulated experience our lives are part of.
I think we also speak more and more in reference in metaphor - like the social exchanges you can now have completely in family guy quotes - and when you want to get a piece of literal, plaintext, raw information concerning actual physical events that took place, you need to mark that out.
As for 'like', everyone under 34 says 'like'. Who knows why? Hundreds of after school specials from the 70's poisoning our speech with hippy adjuncts as children?
-Ben