Like Acute Awareness

Today in class, we discussed Chief Bromden’s crippling awareness, how he suffers from seeing so much of a person’s true nature.  Around that point in the discussion, I felt some crippling awareness of my own.  For some reason unbeknownst to me, the idea popped into my head to focus in on the word “like” as people talked.  Never, ever do this! It is a path to destruction. In zeroing in on the minute details of everyone’s speech, I completely missed the big picture and never understood what they tried to communicate.  Just as Bromden sees too acutely, I listened too consciously, and it made me into a dysfunctional student, just as when he shuts himself down, he stops functioning as a normal human being. Kelly, you happened to be the one speaking as this wild thought sprang upon me, so I’m sorry but I did not catch a word you said, except perhaps “like,” a word you say quite frequently I may add.  In no way do I mean to criticize, I know for a fact I am a big culprit of the frequent but unnecessary additions of “like” to conversation.  I only mean to pose the question: why do those in this school with the greatest grasp on the English language (AP English 12 students) need to speak and add worthless diction “like” between every other word? One would think our constant submersion into works of literature with all the brilliant novels, blogs, journals, and in-class essays would elevate our language above the mistakes of common jargon.  We assuredly never write this way, so why speak so terribly? We should all, like, really, like, stop.