(From a teaching diary:)
Leaving the building I hear this exchange:
“Do you, like, like pubs, or do you, like, like bars?” I imagined some third party interjecting: “what about cafes, cafes?.”.
The frequency of ‘like’ in the speech of your average American student is increasing at an alarming rate, slicing syntax into jerky staccato bites. ‘Like’ is in fact a remarkably multi-functional device, serving alternatively as a sort of colon, speech marks, scare quotes and so on – a kind of grammatical factotum. One of these functions is to render things hedged, tentative, as if to say “this is a lazily approximate formulation, please fill in the blanks”, or ‘I hereby disown accountability for this statement”.
This hedging, provisional approach – compromising even the most flatly factual propositions - extends also to classroom discussion, often signified by the inappropriate rider ‘that’s just my opinion’, as in:
A student expressed the view that the English drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road in order to be different from the Americans. I point out that this isn’t historically the case. ‘Well’, she says ‘that’s just my opinion.’ ‘But it isn’t a matter of opinion” I reply. She becomes bemused and defensive, insisting people are entitled to an opinion on anything. It’s as if the phrase ‘that’s just my opinion’ removes a remark from the sphere of verifiability and turns it into an ‘expression of individuality’, which is of course a sacred and unquestionable good. The tentativeness of ‘that’s just my opinion’ is perhaps just intransigent subjectivism in disguise.