Can this be right? Could the 1995 movie Clueless be partly at fault for the worldwide dissemination of “like” as an adverb, a quotative, a hedge and as a discourse particle in colloquial speech?
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“Could the 1995 movie Clueless be partly at fault”
Depends how much fault is required to qualify as ‘partly’. Gack! I can’t make that sentence work all grammatical-like.
Anyhoo, as with many folks I was introduced via Moon Unit Zappa or that song The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun. Whichever came first.
valley girl – moon unit zappa, 1982.
as this was a take off of girls who talked like this in 1982 – gawd knows when it started off – in the 1970’s?
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=5M9aY7hXjGU
like link.
Dammit, now I’m going to have to rent Clueless again. This movie never gets old.
Anyhoo, as with many folks I was introduced via Moon Unit Zappa or that song The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun. Whichever came first.
.
Yeah. I was gonna say.
.
It used to be, like, cute. Frrr sure. But then, like, it became Oh-My-God really tiresome and braindead and, like, now, I like, really wanna like get my M-60 and murder everyone who says like, oh my God and are you serious!
.
Seriously.
majorly
It’s, like, a remake of Jane Austen’s “Emma”. Only with 1980s language.
Dude that’s so like tubuler. It’s righteousness to the max. Gnarley!
Valley Girl speak & Clueless may have instilled it a new gneration but using “like” in this way came from the Venice Beach beatniks of the 50s surely. If anyone remembers “The Many Loves of Dobbe Gilles” (apart from Tuesday Weld) the beatnik character, Maynard G. Krebs constantly used it in his argot.
Epicene, you are right on. Like, how cool was Maynard G.Krebbs and that, like square ( rectangular finger movements ) Dobie Gillis and Lesley Gore co-eds with hair bands and frocks or ballet tights.
Fast forward to early ‘Seventies: Man, like we are like wow, heads, the straights are like wow, just at so an uncool level ( of consciousness ), wow, like here come some “hey chicks…”.
Beginning of century. A middle aged irritable male mature-aged student strolls thru Ad U on the way to a Napier lecture. Clumps of bland young (erkk!) people stand about in groups comunicating in a language the man at first finds difficult to comprehend the meaning of. Must be all this Kristeva and Foucault stuff about language prior to speech, or whatever ,in action.
The most common sounds are the following two:
“Errddd” is often accompanied by a nod, to signal a continuance of the transmission, but the expressions often take on a visage profound when prefixed of, “Leg”.
“Leg Errd”, when accompanied by afformentioned profound nod appears to signal a transfer of serious information, purged of the capacity for any chance of outside translation by hostile forces.
Our hero applies his newly discovered linguistic knowledge and tentatively theorises a slippage in pronunciation; from the “like , right” of his own, earlier generation and slowly snippets almost become comprehensible. A sharp glance from a sentry or lookout looking up, like with a flock of Galahs, creates sullen silence, and the narrator is driven to a chilled, abject retreat …
My like journal article about Clueless. With like a lot of typos because it’s like the Bnet version.
I’m interested in the way people frequently ascribe cultural phenomena to forms of media (and notable individuals), rather than the media to cultural phenomena.
Surely it is far more plausible, and sensible, to describe Clueless as taking it’s linguistic cues from teenagers.
Or to say JFK didn’t wear a hat at his inauguration because he was attuned to changing fashions rather than the fashion changing as a result of him.
And rather than discuss where fashions, linguistic and otherwise come from, I’m interested in why so much is attributed to the individual or media.
One reason may simply be because you can’t point at Shirley Bloggs who was saying “like” in the 1950s, nor her hatless brother, because they’re anonymous unrecorded figures.
But I think it might be because so much of this pseudo cultural analysis is done my marketeers or media types (who are dependent on advertising). The notion that the media, individual cultural artifacts or individuals can influence the masses is the whole basis of their professions.
There’s no point hiring a marketer whom says they can’t influence people, or identify and manipulate those who can influence.
I don’t think they’re doing this kind of pseudo analysis as an exercise in deception or self justification. I don’t think astrologers believe they’re full of shit either.
It’s just the unchallenged (and even unidentified) assumptions they are bring to the analysis.
Clueless to blame? Sure, if you haven’t seen Valley Girl… How could they write a Wikipedia entry on Valspeak and not mention that movie? Or Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I suspect (it’s been a loong, loong time).
Legg Errddd, Lorra!
Talk about Media Watch.
Plagiarism, egad?
Like back in the ’sixties when pop song writers pinched the best of Mozart and Beethoven for their tacky and sweaty-handed tunes.
Congrats to Richard and Laura for building, unpacking, and otherwise expanding on the thread subject.
Thanks to my old tutors for teaching me just enough to be able to translate some of it.
Well, Richard, that’s what I’m interested in. But no one in Australia in 1995 was talking like a Valley Girl. So, like, how did that start?
It was certainly very prevalent among Melbourne (Australia) teenagers in the late 1960s.
In the late 60s? Using “like” all the time? Really? They were, like, saying, I like…
Like, really!
Maynard G. Krebbs was a huge favourite and role model, viz:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo-p1lBNboI
Like wow!
Well, three of us who were actually there, remember “like” even as spoken by the transcendent Maynard G. Being thirty-five,Kim, you mightn’t have actually been totally au fait with such events as occured over the sixties and seventies, for obvious reasons.
I’ve experienced worse though, like being given patronising apparently first-hand lectures on the Vietnam War era, including Conscription and the Moratoriums against these, by eighteen year olds in tutes a few years ago, disregarding the miniscule fact that I actually was busted in a demo personally.
‘We, like, totally hold these truths to be self-evident…’
Obvs!
… aaaand … four.
Mind you, I was only very young.
But what I do remember is that Maynard G. Krebs’ favourite pastime was going downtown to watch them knocking down the old Endicott building.
Shaggy in the old Scooby Doo cartoon said this, like, all the time.
If Kim is 35 she might have just been a little too young to be reading Dolly around 1983. As a 12 year old boy curious to understand girls, I read my aunt’s copies avidly. I remember a four page article with really crap line drawings explaining the phenomenon of Valleyspeak (especially the “so, like, whatever” forms), and then the end of year Dolly awards gave the movie ‘Valley Girl’ a blast for taking this form of communication and popularising it.
I can’t believe I’m admitting to having such recall of Dolly decades later, but then again I first heard of Joy Division, The Smiths and Velvet Underground in its album review pages, so there.
thanks epicene and others – i watched re-runs of dobie when i was kid – zelda of course was a favourite.
yobbo – this is from wiki:
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis was a major influence on the characters for another successful CBS program, the Saturday morning cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!. Scooby writer Mark Evanier noted that “Fred was based on Dobie, Shaggy on Maynard, Velma on Zelda and Daphne on Thalia.” [1]
Yes, it was around in the sixties and seventies. I was there. (Feels old)
Like-free zone.
I don’t think there is much “valley girl” type speech in “Fast Times…” – even the stoners stuck pretty much to “gnarly” and other surfer-type talk rather than the more obvious “valley” stuff. For me, it reached a new low point in “Bachelor Party” – one particular character who is a friend of the bride goes maximum overdrive valley speak while eating purina cat chow.
I nearly bought a pair of those checkerboard Vans last year, pausing at the last moment as I thought 40 year old man would look ridiculous in them, like totally.
Interesting Jo. I had never heard of Dobie Gillis until now, but I always remember Shaggy’s “like” addiction because as a kid I had never heard anyone talk like that before.
And here I was thinking it was some kind of New York Jewish vernacular. Seriously.
(Though I have seen Clueless.)
Another culprit is method acting, from the ‘fifties onwards; starting with Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan. Mumbling Marlon and James Dean and monosyllabic grunts attenuating sentences.
This migrated to TV scripting for cop shows and sitcom, particularly Spelling-Goldberg and their like and their hordes of Charlies Angels style junk. The build up of Stream of consciousnes culminated in heightened consciousness for an ad break. We incidentally trace this chopping of language back to migrant mangling of English, eg Hymies and Italians.
And the Sarah Palin effect. Civilisation West of the Missisippi is Settler and Indian country. Language is stripped of ornament and form to bare bones monosyllabic as extreme climate, harsh conditions and physical work, combined with linguistic unfamiliarity( blue collar/ Indians ), to outbreaks of solitary grunts.
Gary Cooper.
Australian Outback people seem similarly economic with language.
Bullshit!
Five, and counting.
I thought Maynard G Krebbs was cool. Dobie Gillis, otoh, was a manipulative little twerp.
Que, Ute Man?
FYI, much of the problem also relates to the development of femine hygeine, spray on deodoriser etc products, from the ’sixties onwards.
Ute man make joke Paul. Not a funny joke, but a joke all the same.
Further explorations reveal the problem of “pharangeality”, eg related to a part of the throat called the pharynx.
Presumably this relates either or to the phenomena of “air-conditioned sinusues”, whereby Californians appear to be in the grip of an unending head-cold epedemic, or when they are appearing to choke on a gallon-bucket of their own snot; sounding somewhat like a chook being strangled.
This is a particularly aggravated phenomena when involving adolescent males, already burdened by the problem of pubescent breaking voice.
Also, “upward inflectio”n is mentioned. Australian adolescent women are universally notorious for this characteristic, but the feature is mentioned by some sources inreference to valley-speak also, which renders any lingering desire for this writer to actually view a Valley Girl film is rendered extinct.
Ute Man rules!
The one-man, one-word, “one-liner”.
Oh to have his brute felicity, his languid clarity, his rough-hewn strength. But even as we heap admiring and well-merited epithets upon his stark prose, we stray from the very paths of righteous economy he has so lucidly set forth. We are unworthy.
Ute Man knows I am very fond of country people, David.
“We are unworthy”.
Speak for yourself, Ambigulous.
So you’re happy with the verbal economy of this rendering:
“…which renders any lingering desire for this writer to actually view a Valley Girl film is rendered extinct.”
Truly you are a render of grammar.
Paul W: I speak for myself. Here I stand, I can not do otherwise. (hier stehe ich, usw)
It’s true that a minor grammatical error robs above of its true grandeur, but a more cultivated observer would have seen past technical breaches of to an immanent greatness of substance..
Ambi:
“Ich bin ein Berliner”…
Beat that!
So, in relation to “like” the baby boomers got there first, again.
If you want to call Jack Kerouac and James Dean “boomers”, one guesses so, Katz.
paul walter @ 43 -isn’t it just as well Kennedy didn’t make that speech in Hamburg? I guess Frankfurt was off the itinerary for similar reasons.
The prevalence of “like” in yoof-speak reflects the absence of *real* in modern western life. How much of an infant’s brain is now devoted to working out whether something is actually existent, rather than a representation? “Like” means “an acceptable facsimile”.
Yer all wrong. The origin of the ‘like’ dialect has got to be the Turtles. Cowabunga, man!
Ozy, I see we are now moving from a thread full of snide humour at manufactured crazes and the foibles of young people, to a glimpse at something darker.
We suggest teenagers are dorky and are inclined to laugh at their clumsy responses to initiation into consumer culture, perhaps thinking belatedly later of the complex mental and emotional processes involved and howlittle we know about the possible results of these manipulations.
We fail recognise how they are manipulated into this sort of out of touch with reality being and behaviour by mass marketing subverting culture and psychology worth hundreds of $millions employed for the dubious “benefit” of f-cked-in-the-head corporates.
Instincts and and traits inculcated and part of through parenting and the grothprocess, exploit inexperience toward a consumer oriented goal,regardless of consequences.
Some suggest consumers are not conditioned. Why then the amounts of money spent on dreaming up products as useful as a hippocket on a singlet and then “selling” them ( including “wiring” consumers )?
And if there is complicity,( of course there is, given complex human nature!) is not this complicity exploited toward the end of a world unnecessarily wilfully divided along the lines of oppression by manufactured capricious haves who don’t know themselves and suffering have-nots whose suffering will never be known?
Clueless was like post-Valley speak irony. Kim, you’re twenty years behind the times.
It is him!
Sorry, off-topic, but…
Dr. Cat, the other day I caught your charming discussion of the word ‘crepuscule’ over at your new place (nice jernt, btw), and found myself wondering whether you’re familiar with Thelonious Monk’s lovely composition “Crepuscule with Nellie”. It’s a marvelous piece in its own right, only helped the more by the fact that he wrote it for his wife (I think maybe even literally at her bedside) while she was in the hospital.
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled hilarious discussion of usage arana.