If you are still out there, I wanted you to know that I found your comment for March 8 and posted a response, though I think I did it as if I were another reader. I didn't notice the "post follow up" until it was too late. However, this Friday's entry has "like" in it one time. It is used as a simile and I think the comparison of my little dachshund to a tugboat is funny. If you've ever seen us on the street with him out ahead, you'd probably think so too. In any case, thinking about the love of language reminded me of the use of the word as I looked at it in my text. And reminded me of what I heard on TV last night.
Someone from CBS on 60 Minutes, I think, was interviewing an American who has been teaching in Japan. Apparently he barely escaped the tsunami with his life. But in the interview his use of "like" was incessant: "I was like" and "he was like" and like the water, etc. The more he talked the more pervasive the word became until I thought my ear drums would burst because they were like overloaded. Hmmm. Language, I think, separates us from the animals beneath us in the hierarchical order of the universe. Language, I believe, makes us different in kind from the creatures, not, as Darwin said, just different in degree. My love for the language and all the wonderful things it contains, like the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Keats, etc., makes me strive to be precise, especially in the things I post where I usually have time to rewrite (unlike now), but also in the things I say.