I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.
Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-forties, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.
My contention: this is a consequence of the assertions of modern and post-modern philosophy that there is no such thing as reality.
Note well that this phenomenon is concurrent with a similar decline in ethics, for the same reason. If there is no objective reality against which to refer one's own life, then values become unimportant. (I maintain that we can see this in so-called "distracted driving" cases: the value of safely and competently managing an inherently dangerous machine like an automobile, for the purpose of conducting oneself through reality, is given-over for the "value" of an instant text, as if there were no difference between the two in a context of immanent death.)
In the case of language (the purpose of which is to raise concepts and their referents in reality to the level of percepts for transmission between human beings), the necessarily subjective consequences of such a philosophy render language unimportant because the referents simply don't exist.
This, of course, is only very shortly removed from psychosis, but you can rely on me not to point out endless headlines to make my case.
. . .
I shocked an adult store-clerk into acknowledging his sloppiness . . .
I don't mean to take the thread on a tangent in the very first reply... but I'm LOL, and I'm gonna anyway!
Ah, the importance of dash-placement! When I first read "I shocked an adult store-clerk into acknowledging his sloppiness..." My eyes (mebbe my mind, Idunno) saw "I shocked an adult-store clerk into acknowledging his sloppiness..."
I was like, um, like Pan? Like, whaddaya doin' tellin' us about bein' in an adult-store?
Like, carry on...
::unknowncomic::
ETA: It's not just me!!!! ROTFFLMFAAOL!!!
Alright, can somebody get serial around here or am I gonna have to go get the bat smiley again?oh sh*t, I'm about to get louis-ville-sluuugereded...........
ok, coming in late, ::foilhathelicopter:: and here's like-totally what I get, like, ya know, the first thing that like, ya know, totally jumps out at me, O.M.G. is Pan ::bows:: and adult store ::whoohoo::........
and my minds just fades..............................................
jeeezzzzuuuuusssss.......... I can't even concentrate enough to read the rest................
discalimer: beer-good. ::beertoast::
A comma between "adult" and "store" would have solved the issue as they are both adjectives modifying clerk, "...an adult, store clerk...."
JF, I want to talk to you about your, ahem, boob-tube topics of interest, but first I have to tell Hemm that (egads!) I believe that I understood his last communique! ::hysterical::
Uhm, I forgot what I was saying....
(is the drool apparent)
JF, I want to talk to you about your, ahem, boob-tube topics of interest, but first I have to tell Hemm that (egads!) I believe that I understood his last communique! ::hysterical::
Ok Talk to me.
Victoria's Secret Fashion Show 2010-2011 Part 2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_-sswcE8kg#)
I become equally irritated when a young person is relating an experience to me and each sentence he or she utters , ends sounding like a question .
I become equally irritated when a young person is relating an experience to me and each sentence he or she utters , ends sounding like a question .
I become equally irritated when a young person is relating an experience to me and each sentence he or she utters , ends sounding like a question .
This upward inflection at the end of every utterance is a particular favorite of liberals. It really sheds light on their mental processes (such as they are) because that upward inflection that makes everything into a hybrid of question and statement is typical of their "no such thing as right or wrong" worldview. It's also an ingredient in the overall smugness they exude, because it has a hint of "Am I going slow enough for you, morons?" to it, as well as a healthy portion of self-satisfaction at just how deliberative they are.
I shocked an adult store-clerk into acknowledging his sloppiness - learned from his teenager, he said - when he used "like" in this manner by asking him, "It was "like" that, was it?"