(S)everal times a day somewhere within earshot a teenager in full flow would utter the words, “I was like…,” followed by a little pause and then an accelerated torrent of more words oft accompanied by a cartoonish facial expression.
Why has an entire generation of kids caught this tick? What function does it serve and why them—that is, why this last decade or two of pre-teen to post-college age victims?
As an experiment back in my teenage days, I tried to eliminate all ums, ehs, likes and pauses in my speech. More than anything, I loathed the vagueness and repetition of “I/he/she was like…”, or even just “like”. Hated the way my peers stumbled around every sentence as though they were only partially convinced they should be speaking at all. How every story sounded like it was simile. So I sat down to correct it in my own speech first. Lead by example.
It was a grueling, completely self-inflicted process that did little more than make me sound overly formal for a kid with green hair.