Funny.
Baby Boomers hate like.
Everywhere, cafes and pubs, restaurants, buses and trains, newspaper tweets-and-letters (ha ha) pages, late night talk radio and early morning breakfast TV, Baby Boomers hating like. Hating like in bottle shops and newsagents, supermarkets and cinema queues.
Funny.
It, like, wasn’t invented last week.
It, like, didn’t spring into the vernacular when twelve year-olds noticed it – like – on facebook.
Like? It was punctuation long before Boomers began bemoaning the death of language.
It was, sort of (like), prefigured in nadsat, the argot of Anthony Burgess’ novel about a bright but self-absorbed kid whose priorities get all fucked up.
In the sixties.
Funny.
Like. It passed into popular use via the post-war generation in America.
Middle class white kids seeking place.
Trying to sound like the Beats but lacking their ideas or vocabulary.
Wanting to sound like urban blacks but bereft of their playful inventiveness.
Bereft of imagination.
Take drugs and say things like like instead. Like. Groovy.
Hatching, the like grew up and gave us weasel words and management-speak.
Boomers hate like love weasel words.
Cuckoo.
