So basically, I actually want to literally say that..

[erratio]

This was inspired by a column in the SMH where they had a short paragraph complaining about how these days everyone's peppering their speech with "like", "you know", and "actually","basically", and "literally"

Does anyone have any theories on this? And why those words in particular?

My own theory centres around the way that none of these words actually (there I go again) add much meaningful content to a sentence. Add that to the way that socially it's become much less acceptable to stop and think before speaking, you're expected to reply RIGHT NOW even if you have nothing meaningful thought up yet, and so you start inserting all sorts of qualifiers and extra words just to give you time to think of something relevant to add. I'm still not sure why those particular words, although I think it may have something to do with the way it's easy to put a rising intonation on them..

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

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?

-Ben

[erratio.livejournal.com]

I'm not completely convinced by your argument. Maybe it is a way of marking reality but there's plenty of other phrases you could use instead of those. And how does "like" add anything at all to a sentence, when most of the time it's used completely ungrammatically? Saying something is like something else denotes non-reality if anything, because it's not the real thing, it's only 'like' it.
For that matter, how much of our regular speech these days consists of all those stupid trendy phrases?

[(Anonymous)]

Like (sic) I say, like I have no idea about. It's probably just part of the fabric of young peoples' speech. Words can also be markers of group membership. In fact you could spend a while arguing that that's all they are.

There are plenty of words in English that have no meaning or are indefinable, like 'well'. Nobody attacks them because people under 20 don't use them. Bare in mind that 'opinion column in SMH' is roughly equivalent to 'some middle aged twat who used to be in radio but now has a career writing reassuring back-page columns for the over 50's to fill up half a page each week and has to think of something provocative to write about every time so they can get paid $1200 and put it towards the private education of their 3 school-age children that they just recently had because they were previously too busy in their career to start a family'.

You know, dads. Just because they write an opinion column doesn't mean their opinion has any basis or merit. I mean I read one recently about the overuse of 'air quotes' for god's sake, which the author proposed was one of the many useless conversational appendages used (only, mind you) by those in marketing and PR. This study into human communication was based, presumably, on him seeing someone do it while chatting in a cafe, while he was trying to write his 1100 words on his Acer laptop over a double latte the day before the article was due. I mean, he called 'aerial punctuation' or something. Pure twattery.

My point is.... well basically (ha) SMH is good for front page news and that's about it.

[erratio.livejournal.com]

ok, now I really need to disagree with you. First of all, it wasn't an opinion column, it was part of Column 8, which I didn't menton before because not all my livejournal readers are Australian, and I didn't want to go into the details of explaining how Column 8 works. Secondly, ad hominem attacks have no bearing at all on an argument. Just because the writer is an idiot doesn't necessarily mean that they never say anything worth thinking about, even if you only think about it in terms of why they're wrong and therefore an idiot.
Thirdly.. maybe it is time someone took a look into words like "well".. actually I'm betting someone already has. But they're certainly not completely meaningless in the context of sociolinguistics. Ingroup markers and all that like you say.
So yeh, this entry was someone having a bitch in Column 8 about the preponderance of stupid grammatically incorrect catchphrases, and I thought it was interesting and worth expanding on since it's something I've thought about myself every now and then.

[(Anonymous)]

Fair enough. But column8 submissions are even stupider than opinion columns.
...
:D

[axl12.livejournal.com]

it's basically just to emphasize stuff, like, you know!

[erratio.livejournal.com]

No, I don't, or I wouldn't have asked :)