"Like."

Have you noticed how the word "like" has insidiously developed new roots, particularly in colloquial language? I don't mean "like" in the sense "She is wondrously like the immortal goddesses to look upon." Nor do I mean "like" as in "How I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!"

I mean "like" as in the testimony of a 15-year-old Montrealer involved in the murder of a store owner. As reported in The Gazette of Montreal (May 11, 1994), he described how the victim "was lying on the floor. Half of his head was, like, off."

This ungrammatical use of the word "like" punctuates language like instructions from a film director. It seems to act as a device for alerting listeners to a different scene in the teller's narrative. It introduces a different "likeness," much like a different camera angle presents a new image or scene, and has become all too common.

In a Gazette article (May 15, 1994) that focused on street kids, a 19-year-old recalled the reaction of her parents when faced with her decision to leave home: "They're like 'We love you with all our hearts. We can't stop you from leaving but we'll be here when you come back.'" She also recalled the time when she finally decided to straighten out her life: "It was like, 'OK, I'm 18. I can get a welfare check and live like this forever or I can just stop, get my life together and do something with myself.'"

An article in The Globe and Mail of Toronto (December 28, 1993) neatly discussed how this "like" reflected television's presentation of the world. As Dan Yashinsky explained it: "The young storyteller - and this is what strikes me as new and noteworthy - is impersonating a camera. His narrative moves to the jump-cut rhythms of camera, screen, framed dramatization: zoom, close-up, cutaway. Word-mode seems to have fused with viewing-mode, and the camera's eye has infiltrated the teller's tongue."

Bewitched by screen images, nay controlled by them, people are relating to reality as a continuum of video shots, of likenesses. Their new use of the word "like" attempts to simulate the growing interconnectedness between the real world and the world of video.

In The Unreality Industry, Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis discuss how television has become one of the most powerful forces in our lives and argue: "The consequence is that TV not only defines what is reality, but much more importantly and disturbingly, TV obliterates the very distinction, the very line, between reality and unreality" (p. xxi). The authors stress how the world of unreality, particularly as created by television, increasingly simplifies reality, if not trivializes it, through the "presentation of vast amounts of uncorrelated data, quick-moving and unrelated images" (xxiv).

Comparisons of video and non-video cultures can be revealing. Another item in The Globe and Mail (November 17, 1993) recounts how, after spending a few years in an under-developed country in the South Pacific, international aid volunteer Rob Ferguson felt overwhelmed by the ability of North American television to drive people to lead lives "in a constant state of hyperbole." He expressed astonishment at how advertising and programming hype distorted reality: "The adrenaline rushes of news, images, styles, consumer choices, sexual possibilities and violence are like a quick hit off some instant-gratification drug. Yet the exhilaration is fleeting and the result is ultimately a letdown. You are left wondering what is really real."

Our video culture creates the illusion that the viewer has actually reached wherever the narrative leads him, whether past, present, or future. These images or "likenesses" recreate the semblance of war, of flying in space, of having sex with an image. The viewer can be mesmerized into considering herself a witness to whatever takes place in videoland. Reality then becomes nothing more consequential than a video metaphor, simile, or "likeness."

With the distinction between past, present, and future blurred in this way, events always seem to take place in the here and now. Use of the word "like" reinforces this distortion. In an item published in The New Yorker (February 7, 1994), a woman with sentimental reasons for keeping empty bottles recounts how she arrived home one day and found her precious bottles in the garbage. Having chided her husband for throwing them away, she points out: "And he's like, 'I'm sorry. I had no idea. They weren't labeled.'" In addition to introducing a different camera angle, "like" makes the reader/listener feel part of the scene instantaneously. It's "like" witnessing the story firsthand. Like television?

Critics have noted that society, having set aside traditional measures of beauty and worth, is increasingly reluctant, or unable, to judge and discuss the merits of its own soul and substance. This is reflected in the debasement of the quality of public discourse in recent decades, attributable in part to television's sound-bite mentality. "Like" is but an elementary product of this mentality as expressed by a generation weaned on video popcorn. As video shapes our perception of reality ever more skillfully, society becomes more suggestible and vulnerable.

REFERENCE

Mitroff, Ian I., & Bennis, Warren, The Unreality Industry, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993.

Jean-Luc Plat has been working in the field of communications for over 15 years. He is currently a Translator with the Linguistics and Translation Department of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Societe Radio-Canada in Montreal, Canada.