Help For Teens

   

We're in the home stretch of my Writing the Character-Driven Screenplay class at UCLA Extension and so students are presenting screenplay pages as final assignments.  Last night, we read a scene written by one screenwriter that featured a 14 year-old boy and a 15 year-old girl.  There was uniform agreement in the class that the dialogue was credible and effective -- the characters sounded like contemporary teenagers -- until one dissenter raised his hand.  "Not enough 'like's," he noted.

And he was, like, absolutely right.  Although I have to say, if you were to add a truly realistic number of 'like's to such a scene, it would be twice as long.  Your average human being under the age of 25 uses the word like about as often as most of us use and and the.

As a child in the '60s, I witnessed the first major widespread blossoming of like in the common vernacular (after its initial more beatnik/hipster usage in the '50s); it never went away, and now the abuse has assumed epic proportions.  The more contemporary variant is the "pronoun plus" form, as in: "...and I'm like, she was like idiotic-sounding" which tends to get switched up with the additional all variation, e.g. "he was all like, what are you like talking about?" 

When abused, the like-motif turns its users into cogitation-challenged creatures from some alternate dimension where no one is capable of expressing a direct thought.

Along with pretty much everything else in the culture, quality is disintegrating (see: Against Low Expectations), and we all know that conversation just isn't what it used to be, as this Boston Globe article notes.  But using like is like the nadir of the matter.  There's one common symptom evinced by those afflicted with the Plague of Like: victims are apparently unaware that their compulsive tic makes them sound like a total fucking moron.

Which is why it's a good thing that the Acadamy of Linguistic Awarness [sic] has begun a campaign drawing attention to this invidious social disease.  Hopefully many a like-stricken person will see the ALA posters that have turned up in L.A. recently, such as the one at the top of this post (courtesy of the I Guess We'll Just Have to Adjust site), and this one:

["I'd like to, like, have, like better grades.  But when I, like, talk in the, like, classroom, I like, say a lot of, like, things that my, like, teacher and my, like, classmates don't find, like, convincing.  Is it, like, because I, like, say 'like', like, so much?"]

Let's hope the like-ists are moved to find help.

Meanwhile, I hasten to add that there is, of course, intelligent life in the under-25 universe.  One of the best novels of 2006 is an instant classic that could (if there's any justice) replace Catcher in the Rye as the adolescent bible for a new generation. King Dork, a young adult book, features a 14 year-old protagonist, Tom Henderson, who is brilliant.  And his best friend Sam Hellerman is a genius  ("Sam Hellerman is a genius" t-shirts are already available at the author's website).

Young adults-shmadults -- Frank Portman's King Dork is a better read than 90% of the Big Adult literary fiction out there.  Hie thee to a bookseller if you relate to teen spirit, rock music and/or most excellent reading matter.  Here's a little taste, from the opening page:

They call me King Dork.  Well, let me put it another way: no one actually ever calls me King Dork.  It's how I refer to myself in my head, a silent protest and an acknowledgement of reality at the same time.  I don't command a nerd army, or preside over a realm of the socially ill-equipped.  I'm small for my age, young for my grade, uncomfortable in most situations, nearsighted, skinny, awkward, and nervous.  And no good at sports.  So Dork is accurate.  The King part is pure sarcasm, though: there's nothing special or ultimate about me.  I'm generic.  It's more like I'm one of the kings in a pack of crazy, backward playing cards, designed for a game where anyone who gets me automatically loses the hand.  I mean, everything beats me, even twos and threes. 

Not for long, however, because ultimately -- in the course of a totally twisted journey that includes "dead people, naked people, fake people... a secret code, a head injury, the Crusades, mispronunciation skills, a mystery woman, a devil-head, a blow job, and rock'n'roll," Tom comes into his own and will win your heart in the bargain.

He does it without ever saying like.

Comments

[MaryAn]

Alas, I must disagree with you. Your dissenter was absoutely wrong that there were not enough "likes".

Credible and effective screenplay dialogue doesn't accurately reflect how everyday people really speak anyway -- regardless of age.

If it did, screenplay pages would be full of "uh", "um", "yeah", and that annoying way people say "huh?" or "what?" even when they heard the question but are stalling for time to answer it.

[Anna]

I have to agree with MaryAn. And further, can i just say: I don't want to go to the cinema to hear people talk as ineptly as they do in the real world. just like i don't want to pay to go see a half-assed rom-com where people like each other quite a lot, and get on ok, so make a go of it, and maybe, y'know after a couple of years they'll think of moving in together or something. I want a bright witty script and characters who say things the way you wish you were able to yourself - and great, passionate, perfect-for-each-other romances. we get to see enough of the average, sub-average and crap in real life. give us our wish fulfillment!!

[Brooke]

I started doing to my 17 year old niece what I was taught in a speech class. Everytime she said like, I clapped. Soon I got everyone doing it. She hated me by the end of the weekend, but she wasn't saying like anymore. I told her she'd thank me later. She still hasn't.

[mernitman]

MaryAn: But of course! As I said in the post, "if you were to add a truly realistic number of 'like's to such a scene, it would be twice as long" and obviously I wasn't recommending that -- I'd get my screenwriting teacher license revoked.

What I did suggest was the judicious use of one or two "likes" in the course of the scene, to give the proper vibe...

...which is what, Anna, the savvy screenwriter does to give his/her "bright witty script" the right flavor when it's called for. You know I'm 101% with you on wanting passionate, wish-fulfillment romcoms, but for example, one of my faves - 4 Weddings -- uses a subtle but pervasive number of "ums" and "uhs" to give Hugh Grant's lead the right level of embarrassed, self-deprecating awkwardness.

Brooke that's brilliant, and she WILL thank you, hopefully before you're on your death bed.

[Betsy]

I agree, it's moderation that's called for here. I'm as guilty as the next guy of abusing "likes" and "you knows", but one person I know says both so frequently I decided to tally and it came out to something like 50 or 60 total in about three minutes. Pretty much, if there was a pause at all, there was a like or a you know. Which is a good argument for the posters. I use both in my fiction on occasion, though I agree, fewer is usually better, and sometimes when I do readings of published works I leave even more out!

[E.C. Henry]

Guys, let the dog wag the tail, don't allow the tail to wag the dog!

Culture picks up and copycats what we, the screenwriters, put in movies. Case and point: "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure." Growing to high school in the mid-to-late 80s I physcially watched the deterioration of young minds, who actually wanted to talk like Bill and Ted. Bill and Ted were reknowed slackers for those who haven't seen the movie. One kid at my high school even used their infamous tag-line, "Be excellent to each other," as his final remembrance in the high school annual.

So... the moral of the story is (from E.C. Henry's perspective), don't write down to culture's level, meet culture at some common ground, then encourage it to come back up to a higher level.

- E.C. Henry in Bonney Lake, WA

[Daniel W.]

Kids today! Why, when I was young, we had great speech disfluencies; we used "um" and "er" but never "like". Certainly it isn't the case that nobody speaks English (or any other language) without inserting certain placeholder sounds while they speak and "like" is merely the placeholder currently favored by young people. No, this generation of young people, when they deviate from what was formerly done are signifying a degraded culture by doing so. Because it's, you know, different from the way things were done in the past.

[mernitman]

Betsy: Less is surely more.

E.C., I don't believe anyone here is talking about "writing down to culture's level"; the discussion in the comments above is about stylistic choices in being accurate and credible.

Daniel, you seem to be under the impression that there's an anti-youth bias here, and/or that we're old farts talking about how "it was better in our day." Not at all. As the post indicates (in its second part), there's brilliance aplenty in "the kids these days" (some of my favorite recording artists and performers are under 25) -- I'm an advocate for intelligence, period.

If you're living in America and you've actually spoken with and listened to contemporary teenagers, you cannot possibly believe that there was just as much "like abuse" and its equivalent, even 20 years ago. See Betsy's comment above. I did a similar experiment on the UCLA campus a few months back and timed an overheard 20 year-old (by my stopwatch) at 32 uses of the word "like" in 2 minutes.

If you don't think that's indicative of a "degraded culture," we can agree to disagree, but sorry, dude: what's happening now is like, in no way like the way it was, like, in the past.

[mernitman]

One more thing -- I love your wonderfully descriptive phrase "placeholder sounds," but not to get all semiological/semantical on this --in the case of "I was like..." and "she's all like..." the phrases don't act as pauses (i.e. the equivalent of "um" and "er"); what's boggling about it is how FAST people are as they use these particular variations (e.g. in the sentence "I'm like, why is Billy all like bent out of shape over this?!" the second like phrase gets no comma-like micro-pause at all).

Apologies, Daniel, I'm like clearly over-caffeinated. :-)

[binnie]

I recently heard a linguist discussing the "like" issue on TV. She called it a "discourse interrupter" (which I thought sounded vaguely dirty, but anyway...) and that the onset of the Like Generation began with the Valley Girl characters in "Clueless". As if!

[markensparklefarkle]

I think Billy Mernit is next years, Ira Glass... even your minor moments are relevant to us all. (well almost)

I have two teenage daughters, they have tons of friends... from what I can tell, this "like" plague is starting to ebb... slowly.. maybe.. well I can dream cant I?

Certainly there are precursors of all sorts... but what I "like" about "like" is that is so fitting for the post madonna era, full on material, preemptive strike kinda world.

Whereas like is a form of punctuation; it may be imprecise, but fuck, they are kids. I think the slippery slope of "like" is that it is an approximation. Its massive use, mostly in white middle class and above culture... (black kids dont use it much and maybe hispanic girls do, the ones that i know) is a demonstration that these kids, are having a really hard time figuring out what is what.

They say LIKE, because they know somewhere that an experience called life is nearby... they can almost smell it, almost taste it... but after a long day of dealing with hormonal rushes and insane levels of our adult expectations of CONFORMITY... they flail about like freshly caught tuna being poured into the hold of a fishing boat.

After returning from the MALL and buying something new... and IMing with friends for another 3 hours... they think that maybe they should be "like" happy.

This is one of those, Shoot Your TV, bumper sticker moments. Instead of clapping when ever a kid says it... I would give them a Nirana cd and tell them to "Like" go have a listen.

[markensparklefarkle]

sorry, thats NIRVANA, for all of you who slogged through that last one till the bitter end.

[Lucy]

"Like" doesn't seem to have caught on that much in the UK (or at least the South West of the Uk, where I am) but I HATE most teenage additions to the language...Over here it's usually "well" as in "well-funny", "well-scary", "well-clever" etc etc. This seemed to start in my teens and I hated it then, too. Now I'm 26 and it's banned in my classroom, so I guess if Billy's an old fart now, I've been an old fart all my life! ; )

[Craig]

My 8th grade students are partial to the “he was all like” variation. But thanks to the miracle of summer vacation, I don’t have to hear it for 10 weeks. That’s 10 weeks of uninterrupted screenwriting time. (What’s the fun of being a teacher if you can’t rub that in during the warm glorious summer?)

As a reading teacher, let me offer a simple theory that was touched on in a previous post. People, in general, don’t read enough today. Your vocabulary is built by reading. Ergo, they simply don’t know how describe what they want to say. I’ve also found that in the age of ADD and ADHD most of my students are actually suffering from a more common aliment. They are LZ. (LAZY) I have one student who was so lazy he would start a sentence, get tired halfway through, and just end in the middle with “yeah.” I wasn’t his favorite teacher because I had the audacity to make him complete the sentence properly.

That being said, I do realize there are brilliant teenagers all over this great land of ours. (Most of them related to people who read this fine blog.)

My solution. Limit television, limit the computer, and open a book.

[Denise]

This was like, a really great discussion.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

I agree with Craig's point that teenagers are lazy, but teenagers have always been lazy, haven't they?

I wonder if it has more to do with the influence of television, (and not enough reading as Craig points out). My theory is that the use of the word like has to do with fitting in. That's the way everyone talks, so that's the way they talk. And how do they know that that's the way everyone talks? Because they hear it on TV. And in the movies.

Which brings me to my next comment, which is that I agree with MaryAn and Anna, and a few other people who made similar comments. I don't think always a good thing for movies to reflect the 'real' world.

Don't even get me started on reality TV.

I also love Brooke's method for snapping her niece out of the like habit. When my fourteen year old niece uses the word like ten times in one sentence I want to smack her upside the head. I wonder if that would have the same positive effect as the clapping?

[mernitman]

Marken: Thank you for getting to the matter I had no time or space to approach, i.e. what the phrase really MEANS! In a post some time ago, I talked about the resurgence of "actually," "really" and "literally" as overused words, citing this as evidence of the culture's increased distance from "reality," whatever that is, and direct experience. Clearly "like" is another indicator...

Lucy: wasn't familiar with the "well" phenom; I'll look out for it (old fart at 26? not highly likely!)...

Craig, yes, this reading thing is a current controversy, especially since "reading" begins to mean, more often than not, "reading on-line"...

Denise, you're like, crackin' me up (and not upside the head)...

[Patty]

Some 20+ years ago I was in a college art library and was amused to overhear two students at my table conversing. The guy's input consisted entirely of "And it was like, you know?" repeated ad nauseum. No, I did not know. But she apparently did. They left together. A rom-com ending?

[jen]

I'm embarrassed to admit that I do sometimes say "I was all" when talking to my sister or friends. I think it started as a joke, but...

However, the reason I'm leaving a comment is to cast another vote in favor of King Dork. It's all the things Billy said, plus almost impossible to put down. I was sorry when it ended.

[mernitman]

Patty: Aw... cute... maybe we call it Rom-Com For Dummies?

Jen: at least you were all, but you weren't all LIKE...

[catherine Railton]

In defense of teens, and against the constant sterotyping of them, perhaps we can use the default language when it applies to that character, that teen, of that culture, that class, that time, that place, that intelligence, rather than lumping them all in to the "teens of today". One it would be more true, and two it would be more interesting. Their words would mean something, even the "likes" and "you knows"could show us something of their inner life, even if on first encounter it all sounds insipid. Like Eliza Doolittle, underneath the aws and ahs, a real soul exists and needs respect. Verdad??? Haven't we all been there?

[mernitman]

Like, yuh-huh!