A University of Toronto sociolinguistics professor has discovered that those under 40 are much more likely to use the word "like" when narrating a story, than those over 40. As in "I'm like, 'What are you talking about?' " instead of "I said, 'What are you talking about?' "
This linguistic difference is a key demographic marker, says Sali Tagliamonte, who has published a paper exploring the use of "be like" in the scholarly journal Language Variation and Change.
"The use of 'like' is a watershed. It captures a change in how people narrate their stories," she says. "We think it came from California in the 1980s and it gained prestige as a trendy and socially desirable way to voice a speaker's inner experience."
I couldn't find the original article (and you have to subscribe to the journal to see anything more than the abstracts), but this brings up a good point for fiction writers.
We tend to think of our own speech as "normal," and in dialogue most of our characters will speak as we do. If you're a teenager writing about teenagers, that's probably fine. But if you're a teenager writing a historical novel, or a fantasy, your characters may still sound like 21st-century teens. (And if you're a 50-something writing young-adult fiction, you're likely to get into big trouble!)
As a writer and as an English teacher, I've paid close attention to speech patterns and usage for over 50 years. I well recall when "like" emerged in Beat Generation novels, cheerfully plagiarized from black jazz musicians by white kids like Jack Kerouac. The LSD converts in the 1960s used "like" a lot as a way (I guess) of conveying what their hallucinations were, uh, like. Eventually it mutated (young people would say "morphed") into a synonym for "said."
And as a soon-to-retire teacher, I could predictably paralyze a class with hilarity just by speaking the way the students did.
To strengthen your dialogue, then, listen hard. Notice the vocabulary and cadence of English spoken by your grandparents or your grandchildren. When you read novels written in the 1950s (or 1850s), pay attention to the dialogue.
Did Victorian Londoners really speak in that ornate style? Actually, they probably did; it was a society that enjoyed reading and being read to, and cherished big vocabularies. (Even then, notice the class and generational differences in the dialogue of Dickens's characters.)
Also notice the words and expressions that don't show up in, say, Jack Kerouac or Norman Mailer's early work. Chances are that much of your own vocabulary stems from developments in the language since then. You could create an awkward anachronism by having your World War II platoon talking like one on patrol in Baghdad.
Quite apart from ensuring historical accuracy, listening for usage and dialect makes you notice what's new—expressions coming into the language from all kinds of sources. Picking up on them can sensitize you to the language and make your future dialogue that much richer.
These things come and go. Several years ago, similar articles talked about using "goes" in the same way, as in "Sarah goes, 'What are you gonna do about it?'" I've yet to read a novel not intended for a juvenile audience that uses this kind of idiom to introduce dialogue. Of course, this would work when a _character_, esp. a youthful one, is narrating what another character or figure said, provided it fit the character (or was made to do so, for instance if the character was mimicking the speech of someone else).
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Posted by: Max Fiction | August 24, 2009 at 01:05 PM