Re: USAGE: 'like' as a referent to quoting

Hi!

James Worlton <JWorlton@...> writes:
>...
> Since exploding onto the scene in the early 1980s, be like, as in
> the example below, is well on its way to becoming the preferred way
> that younger speakers quote themselves and others in conversation.
>
> (1)		It took ten-minutes for the damn things to die
> 				and I’m like, “Can I put on the lid?”
> 				And she’s like, “No, it ruins it.”
> 				and I was like, “This is horrifying.”
WAAAH!  I hate this! :-)

In Germany, the same habit exists for young people and it drives me
crazy that they cannot talk normally.  In German it goes:

    und ich so:  ,...'
    dann sie so: ,...'
    ich so: ,...'
    ...

WAAAAH!

I *hope* they are not using this in later life, because I fear I
cannot go out of my house when half the people speak like that!  In my
childhood, we used to have a narrative form that vanished from my
active usage.  It was a topic-comment construction with same kind
of serial verb construction that used the plain present tense stem:

   Ich, aufsteh, was eß, zur Bushaltestelle geh, wart, wart.
   TOP  V            V                      V    V     V

Something like that.  My mother hated it in the same way I hate this
,ich so, sie so, er so'.  I have the same strong feeling about the
English ,I was like, she was like, etc', btw. :-)

Generation problems...

**Henrik

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