Great post. Spot on.
I have trouble understanding the lazy speech of many young people that is replete with nonsensical fillers such as “like”, “you know”, “totally” and other quasi forms of Valleyspeak. Its as if it takes too much effort to clearly enunciate words.
My biggest linguistic pet peeve as of late is how the youth are using “so...” with a drawn out ‘o’ at the end of sentences as if to elicit a response from others or otherwise just fill the air with vacuous noise.
Hell, I run across dozens of pictures of text messages between teens on sites like Reddit and Imgur, and I literally cannot understand what they’re saying. I’m 33 years old! I’m far from what I would consider “out of the loop,” but these kids are on a completely different, I contend DUMBER, level than the rest of us.
***“you know”,***
This is not a “valley girl” speech pattern as I remember back in 1976, our welding school teacher at a vo-tech school was telling us some story.
In a five minute story, dragged out over ten minutes, he used the term “you know” more than fifteen times. I know because after he used it so much I started quietly counting.
“This old boy, you know, went over to a bar and, you know, got a drink and while there saw this, you know, good looking girl and , you know, blah blah, you know, blah blah blah, you know,...”