"Like"

Towards the Archeology of a virus: a hermeneutics of (dis)like

     “Everything is what it is, and not another thing.” Bishop Butler

     I recently landed in New York in the midst of a severe epidemic. I had, of course—having served for 30 years as a schoolmaster--been conscious for a long time that it was in progress, but I was hardly prepared for the ubiquity and virulence of what I have witnessed. It’s Camus all over again: “La Peste.” I cannot pretend to provide a scientifically adequate description of the malady, which I happily leave in the competent hands of my medical colleagues.[1]

     But the essence of the matter is simple: the extremely frequent (quantify?) and apparently compulsive insertion of the word “like” into putative sentential units of spoken discourse. (As far as I have been able to discern, the written language remains virtually uncontaminated.)

     Just in case you don’t know what I’m referring to, here’s a sample:

     “It was, ya’ know, like yesterday, and we were, like, looking for, like, a t-shirt [rising inflection of the voice]? We, like found this, like, store, but, ya know, fuck, like the owner was, like, soo like, stupid, that he didn’t, like, have any? Like, it was so, like, fucking depressing, I, like, ya know, almost, like, barfed.”

     The disease seems to afflict primarily the young, although it has been proliferating for so long now that 30 year old arbitragers are as likely to exhibit symptoms as the pre-pubescent. (I suppose that the inception of the outbreak can be dated to more or less the same time in which nose-rings, purple hair, and tattoos, became de rigueur.)

     The disease seems equally to attack all social classes, races, sexual persuasions, and genders. I had originally thought that “higher” education provided the ideal environment for transmission, but I now see this is probably not the case. I’ve observed Ivy League graduates, recent Indian immigrants, and pretty much all the contributors to the New York ”melting pot” who have been infected. I’d also flirted with the idea that susceptibility was greater in women, perhaps as a manifestation of learned deference and fear of appearing overly assertive. But again, I now see that this is wrong. It is quite clear: no one is immune.

     The “like disease” is an example of what Richard Dawkins (THE SELFISH GENE) calls a “meme”: a unit of social behavior or belief that can be transmitted in a manner analogous to the inheritance of genes. (Other examples of memes would be the neurotic use of baseball caps (put backwards) and the custom of young black men wearing their pants down around their knees, exposing a large swath of designer underpants.)

     What is the causus infectionis? Perhaps part of the explication lies in its unquestionably attractive metaphysical presuppositions. Pace Butler, it seems true that everything is, in some respect or other, like other things. Bagels are like neutrinos, in that both are “material.” New York is like the Sahara, in that both are “big.”

     On the other hand, the phenomenon might well be a reflection of Postmodernist angst about truth. If you say that “X is, like Y,” perhaps you might evade the full intellectual responsibility implied in brazenly asserting that X is Y. (You never know if Derrida is lurking, disguised in a hooded sweatshirt, on 7th Avenue.) To be exposed to the afflicted is a severe trial on the patience of the healthy.                

     Yesterday, I was stuck behind two, otherwise attractive, young female carriers on crowded Canal Street and was forced, for at least a block, to witness their symptoms. I was more tempted to stop them and throw a tantrum than I had been earlier during the day when countless fellow pedestrians blew cigarette smoke in my face or let their dogs piss on my shoes. I’m glad I was able to maintain my discipline, for surely I would have received nothing more than a “Like, whatever,” for my pains.

     Last night, it happened again. I was pinioned, in an otherwise delightful Spanish restaurant in the Village, next to two Asian executive types, who drove me almost to the point of “going postal” with their moronic, high pitched, prattle.     

     How should we as a civilization respond? This is indeed a difficult problem, and I offer the following reflections only as tentative suggestions.

     Obviously the first step in confronting the epidemic is clearly and publicly to recognize its existence. Perhaps a major philanthropic foundation, e.g., one of those that power drill their dot.com addresses into our minds on NPR, could finance an epidemiological study.

     One potential line of cure would be Pavlovian. I’m sure it would be child’s play for some amateur inventor to design a device that would administer a mild electric shock in response to each superfluous “like.” More humanely, perhaps, the device could emit a “beep” (like those which mask profanity on the radio), although initially the din in public space would be a major concern.[2]

     Another tactic might be to enlist the resources of higher education. For example, universities and colleges could make it part of the admissions process that the applicant be able to conduct a five-minute conversation with a (trained) speech “counselor” without using “like” more than once. And/or, there might be an “exit exam” before graduation.

     These solutions, evidently, have severe drawbacks; one of the most consequential would be a massive curtailment of participation in higher education. Another is the unpleasant fallout for sons and daughters of the rich and powerful. In the end, the situation—as is the case with AIDS, global warming, and overpopulation--looks grim. The disease, like cholera and the mumps, is not responsive to reasoning. Pending the discovery of an effective vaccine, one must be content to protect oneself and to ensure that minor children in one’s care be vigilantly monitored. At the first signs of contagion, children should be quarantined and, if necessary, sent to a foreign country whose language is not Indo-European, for a protracted period of time. And perhaps it’s time to revive my dear mother’s frequently invoked home remedy: “You say that again, and I’m gonna wash your mouth out with soap!”

[1] Perhaps a promising line of investigation would be to calculate a value for the likelihood of “like” occurring over a given temporal interval, e.g., 90% probability every 15 seconds (assuming, of course, constant rate of speech production). Levels of infection could then be diagnosed on a completely objective scale and treatment proportioned to the severity of the individual case. Other models, e.g., “thick” description, will commend themselves to non-quantitatively oriented investigators.

[2] As an illustration of the “beep” option—here used for the enlightenment of others rather than as a curative strategy--I offer the example of a You Tube clip of Carolyn Kennedy (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAgI4AS1NVg), who suffers from a very similar linguistic disability to the one under discussion here. Fairly obviously, the danger of infection by multiple speech impediments also lurks on the horizon. A hypothesis worth investigation is the suggestion that susceptibility to one virus increases the probability of contracting another, due to the general weakening of the linguistic immune system.