Friday, June 22, 2007
Ponder Post 2
After the sensational, global success of my Ponder Post 1, I have decided to cash in at once with Ponder Post 2. I have been mulling over a few possibles - Why Canada? How many roads must a man walk down? Is it better abort than be barren (thanks to Samuel Beckett)? Feel free to present your musings on these subsidiary matters. But the primary matter to be pondered on this occasion is: what, exactly, does the word 'like' mean when used, apparently randomly, by girls aged between 13 and 25? Or boys, I suppose, but with them it's often hard to be sure the word they are using is actually 'like'.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
like I'm supposed to know what it means.
ReplyDeleteyou've reminded me of the poser; would you drink canada dry? why canada, why not? it's beneficial to the alaskans.
ReplyDeleteas it happens i know about girls, so i can set you right there. Now it might sound like the Middle English 'eke', a near-meaningless word used to pad out sentences, but in fact girls are merely acknowledging the centrality of metaphor not only in all speech but in human being itself, that to live is to be constantly interpreting, making connections between things.
ReplyDeleteInstead of saying, "so, like, I was f*cking waiting for this bus, yeah? And this -" etc., they are really saying "Tav tvam asi."
I thought it was used to distinguish similes from metaphors
ReplyDeleteI find it quite endearing - no problem with it at all. rather the same way I feel towards the bombay nod. we're all the better for this sort of thing than if it didn't happen at all.
ReplyDeleteMost Canadians have a hard time answering that question.
ReplyDeleteGirls use like as a segue into a demonstration of behavior in lieu of actually describing it. So they will say thing like:
ReplyDeleteAnd so she was like "no way" and he was like "aaarrrrgh", so then she was all like "speak to the hand loser" and he was like "waaaaagh" and then Brianna came up and she was all, like "whoa!" and then he was like "this sucks!", and then Brianna was like.....
To the question of roads, I can only answer:
ReplyDeleteAs many as it takes.
(YMMV)
Uuuh, the primary matter, is, youknow, basically ahhh an interjection ?
ReplyDeleteThis remainds me that I ran across a transcript of Matt Lauer's recent interview of the two princes. William appears to say youknow about every 3 words no matter what he's saying, which isn't much because Harry answers everything.
Bryan, given your reputation as an interviewer nonpariel, isn't it considered bad form to insert all of the "ahs," "uhs," and "youknows" into a transcript like this? I'd heard one only does that when one detests the subject.
As with Canadian bacon, Danish pastry and French kisses, the question "Why Canada?" is only asked in foreign lands and earns but puzzled looks of incomprehension in the land of the maple leaf. But ask "Why Wales?" in a Canadian sports bar and you had better be ready to punch or duck.
ReplyDeleteAmericans, Ronin, tend to be more pedantic about exact transciptions. A fetish for detail, probably caused by the legal system. Here we accept a dgree of tidying up.
ReplyDeletePuts me in mind of an episode of NYPD Blue, where the great Andy Sipowicz is interrogating a lowlife with a habit of interspersing every sentence with 'You know what I'm sayin'?' Eventually an exasperated Sip hisses, 'Listen pal, any time I don't know what you're saying, I'll flag you down.'
ReplyDeleteThis great and good man also invented the wonderful term 'aggrieved Third World pisspot'.
whenever i fear losing my hair i think of Sipowicz, and smile. When that day comes i shall hack the sleeves off my shirts & buy a tie.
ReplyDeleteas for similes & metaphors etc. i went to school with David Hockney, and consequently never learnt anything.
You know like emm anyway yeah but not like you know, anyway you know what I mean.
ReplyDelete... etc.
ReplyDeleteDuck's 'like' is the California teenage girl 'like', which our girls do use, but our girls also use it to mean both 'y'know' and 'innit', and, occasionally, 'sort of'.
ReplyDeleteI've heard girls stretch even the most limited pieces of information into full-blown soliloquies purely by combining vast great strings of these different uses of 'like'.
Talking of American transcript pendantry, one thing that really bugs me is when they insert the word APPLAUSE between paragraphs of some jerk's speech.
Is the British "yeah?" inserted throughout recounted events the same as the American "you know what I'm sayin'?" When I listen to teens talk, it's almost like the "like" is standing in for quotation marks. "And she said, like, 'He ain't my boo,' and we were like, 'Damn straight he is, sorry ass and all!'"
ReplyDeleteListen to 'Valley Girl' by Frank Zappa from 1982. It might be affectionate but I find it rather patronising, especially when the language of the Valley girls has caught on so spectacularly. Like, oh my god, respect, totally.
ReplyDelete