Pwn The Net

A youtube video sent me into a mad rage tonight. It like involved like a like naive twenty/teenager who like couldn’t like stop like using the word “like.” ARGH! It made the video unwatchable in less than 15 seconds.

The content of the video was not bad either; the editing effects were pretty good, and I even found the topic interesting. Regardless, the speech was so bad I gave it a poor, ONE star rating. I then found myself trolling in the comments afterwards and had to stop myself before posting something ugly. I am still so disgusted that I will not give credit and link to the video.

On one hand I hate to be a grammar Nazi, because I know that I am guilty of using a less than optimal vocabulary and sometimes have imperfect sentence structure, but I’m still fuming mad.

Some people call the ‘like’ thing “valley girl talk” or “valspeak,” but the definition of that is much too broad. It includes all the other things too that the socal dialect/culture says. There had to be a word or phrase that described this single, stupid phenomena, and I finally found it. It’s called “speech disfluency,” and more specifically “fillers.”

Speech Disfluency (from Wikipedia) — various breaks, irregularities, or utterances that are often not consistent with any specific grammatical construction and occur within the flow of otherwise fluent speech. These include, for example, words and sentences that are cut off mid-utterance, phrases that are restarted or repeated, repeated syllables, grunts or unrecognizable utterances occurring as ‘fillers’, and ‘repaired’ utterances.

Fillers are the things that people use when their brain cannot come up with something fast enough. “Uh,” “er,” “um,” and “like” are all fillers.

Speech disfluency is my top ranking pet peeve. Not even retarded internet memes (OVER 9000!!!1) can touch the hatred that I have for the overuse of the word “like.” Now that I know exactly what to call it, I’m going to be an asshole about it. The next time that I have to speak with some tween who uses “like” more than once in a sentence I’m going to announce that they are “speech disfluent.”

Please Note: If you are guilty of regularly using speech disfluent fillers please understand that you sound like a jackass. Slow down and think about what you are saying before you say it. People who use fillers sound vastly smarter when they say NOTHING at all in place of them.