Like, it's hard for teens to change how they talk

Is it driving anyone else crazy?

I'm talking about the tendency of teens to say "like." Like, all the time! Like, constantly!

I've tried to quash this tendency in our three teen daughters with limited success. These high-schoolers are charming, articulate, smart and competent -- but put them in a group of their peers and the "like" monster shows up and starts to strangle their vocal cords.

I've warned them repeatedly about verbal ruts: If they carry on with "like" in casual speech, it will infiltrate and poison their verbal dexterity at a time when they really want to sound fluid and coherent.

I've made them stop speaking, back up and repeat the sentence without "like."

That lessens its occurrence, but only until they're back gabbing among friends. Then "like" shows up again, roaring back into their speech like that one bad-influence friend you wish would stay away.

I think of "like" like I think of invasive weeds in the yard. Pull the weed, dig the root, or spray the Round-Up. Repeat week after week, summer after summer. They lessen but they never disappear.

Dandelions have a deep-seated death-grip somewhere in the netherworld beneath our lawns.

"Like" has a coiled, spreading, tangled, omnipresent death-grip somewhere deep in our teens' brains.

I asked the most articulate, creative man in town, Neuqua Valley High School English teacher Mike Rossi, about "like." Even immersed among teens, in a job where he lives and breathes teenage verbal self-expression, Rossi is more relaxed about "like" than I am.

He says the trend is noticeable not just in high school students, but in many young faculty as well.

"The word 'like,' as near as I can tell, has evolved into a sort of verbal interference not unlike 'um,' " Rossi e-mailed.

"It serves the same purpose -- it buys the speaker a few extra seconds to figure out what he wants to say, allows him to arrange his thoughts. I hear it more when it's teens talking to teens than when it's teens talking to adults, but it's never absent.

"Actually, it's not even that new a trend -- it entered the teenage lexicon in the 1950s when teens began to use it to express hyperbole. It achieved national prominence with the valley girl fad in the early '80s.

"Interestingly enough, as a verbal tic I've seen it in writing from the late 1790s -- they would often arrange the syntax of a simile like this: 'The wind moves ballet dancer, like.' It's unusual and archaic, but there it is!"

Indeed. Hmm. Perhaps "like" is not the hateful hydra I think it is. Perhaps it's just another evolutionary step in our ever-changing, ever-fluid language. Perhaps my effort to slice off its head whenever I hear it is a hopeless battle against the inexorable onward march of English.

But then again, that's an awfully charitable view of a word that I still, deep down, believe is kudzu on the landscape of our language.

I wanted to investigate. Does "like" improve communication? Let's listen in on a recent after-school conversation around our kitchen table, as two classmates work on a poster for school. While cutting and pasting, their wide-ranging conversation tumbles along as fast as the rain-swollen creek behind our house.

The first topic is the plot of Oedipus: "They're like, basically, you can't do anything, like, to change your life." Then current television: "I'm like so excited. I love 'The Office.' I'm like obsessed with it." Then tests: "After that AP test I was like brain-dead, I was so done!"

Then, on the topic of magazines, the worst happened. Unbidden, as I prepared dinner nearby, out of my own mouth, came the sentence, "'National Geographic' is so interesting. It's sort of like news in the long-term."

AAargh! It's finally happened. I'm infected! Somebody get the Round-Up and spray it down my throat!

• Contact Cheryl Stritzel McCarthy at otbfence@hotmail.com.