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?”