I am listening (with extreme torture) to a podcast who has a guest on where EVERY DAMNED SENTENCE is linked together with the work *like*! 🤬

OMG! PLEASE STOP IT!

They're using it as a conjunction HOWEVER conjunctions should NOT be used to link ALL SENTENCES that come out of your mouth together.

If you speak a paragraph and you can remove the word "like" and that paragraph would be seen as a run-on sentence, then simply insert punctuation in your wording! It's a HINT, folks!

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@jann I agree it can be overdone, but I'm coming around to the idea that such words provide a valuable use to our language.

On a related note, there was a really great episode of Alan Alda's podcast discussing this recently:
open.spotify.com/episode/4AVE9

@LouisIngenthron It's not the word that I mind. It's the incorrect usage so many times in one person's communication to another.

@jann It's incorrect for the rules of grammar that you and I were taught in school, but is it really incorrect for the modern form of the language where we all understand its meaning?

One example that podcast I linked above used was "the more the merrier". The word "the" absolutely shouldn't work like that under normal grammar, but it forms a clause that we all understand as "when there are more, then it is merrier".

It seems the word "like" is undergoing a similar mutation.

I'm not explaining it that well, but the podcast really made me think about these sorts of things in a different light. You might find it interesting too.

@LouisIngenthron I'll listen to the podcast, but one of the things that irritates me is people tend to pronounce "liKe" with a VERY heavy K *all the time*. Oh, well. It's my problem...

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