Jim Duncan, local realtor, strays off the topic of realty to post a picture of a billboard imploring people not to use the work “like” as punctuation: “Don’t sound stupid, stop saying like“.
Jim’s point is that in a professional world, such as realty, one needs to sound professional. I agree, but would carry it further. As a blogger, I’ve written some fabulously stupid things, but in life, I think we should all sound as smart as we are.
The billboards, posted by the apocryphal Acadamy (sic) of Linguistic Awarness (sic) around UCSD last May, convey the message that today’s youth, even the presumably educated ones on college campuses, risk sounding uneducated due to their shockingly limited use of grammer. Several jobs back, I worked in a student bookstore. One afternoon, a young man who did not realize that the front of his cap was the side with the bill, approached me at the register brandishing a dollar and asked “Can I get, like, change?”
“Like change?”, I asked. “Slugs are like change. I can get some of those. Or how about Neccos? Those are kind of like change, and you can eat them!” His only reply: “Can I get, like, quarters?”
We associate this kind of speech with insecure youth, but according to an article published by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, this type of vernacular is now creeping into the speech of such luminaries as “President” Bush, Roseanne Barr, and Oprah Winfrey.
Gee, let’s not set that bar too high.
(The same article quotes an English professor named Muffy Siegel, so I think we can safely dismiss the whole thing.)
I sat in a technical presentation a few years ago where the presenter, reading from prepared material, kept punctuating his sentences with “basically”. He would pause, look down at his notes, then proceed, “Basically, we capture the data in a text output then basically import it into an SQL database…”. After the fifth or sixth basically, I began marking them down. At the end of 22 minutes, he had said “basically” 47 times, or more than twice a minute. Pretty impressive, basically.
So I’m with Jim on this one. In a business world, let’s try to sound like we know what we’re talking about. That includes speaking with certainty, trying not to repeat yourself, using words properly, trying not to repeat yourself, and don’t use “like“, “basically“, or “I mean…”
“I mean, I read the newspaper. I mean, I can tell you what the headlines are. I must confess, if I think the story is, like, not a fair appraisal, I’ll move on.â€
— George W. Bush