As for the word “like”, it seems to have become the most widely misused word in the English-speaking world. It’s various misapplications can be heard with ever-increasing frequency in films, television broadcasts, parliaments, boardrooms, classrooms and lecture theatres alike – in short, in all the places from which it should be expunged.

I have even contemplated writing an article on the theme. Leaving aside the lamentable use of “like” as a word to fill in pauses during speech, the most interesting cases, for me, involve its misuse in place of “as if”, “as though”, “as” or “such as”. I have dubbed these various forms of misapplication the songwriter’s “like” (on the model of the greengrocer’s apostrophe), as one or other of them appears in about half of all English-language songs released since the 1960s. Well, a third is perhaps nearer the mark, but that’s still not an insignificant proportion. Try it out – listen out for the word “like” in three randomly chosen songs written in the last forty years or so, and I’ll bet you hear at least one incidence of its misuse. (Obviously the experiment will be of little value if you include any rap or hip-hop songs, as they are almost guaranteed to include one of the above-mentioned misapplications, in addition to numerous other grammatical abominations.)

Perhaps I should have added this topic to the article “Does Your Writing Make You Seem Uneducated.”

To me, this issue is not simply one of the language evolving. It is about the language breaking down and people becoming less coherent. How people write does affect how they are perceived and how well they can communicate. When people use words and phrases that don’t mean what they intend, when they do not employ correct grammar, when they cannot punctuate according to common usage, they limit their ability to communicate.

When a society loses its ability to communicate well, it collapses.

Sigh.

I know people who use like excessively and have found myself doing it on occassion. Ugh! There are so many good words to use, why over-use one?

Worse yet, “fewer” and “less.”

“Fewer are thing you can count like the numbers of dollars in your pocket, beans in the stew, pennies in the piggy-bank, items in ANYTHING. “My mom’s soup recipe has fewer cups of stewed tomatoes.”

“Less” is any amount, something uncountable. Gas in the tank (not gallons), water in the jug (not drops or cups), dump load (not pounds), bus load, not passengers. “I have less junk in my garage than you do.”

On another subject, did you actually use “alright” the other day? Is that like “alwrong”? Same thing but opposite, right?