Opus Magnum

Our usual Jargon Genesis author, Shanna, is on vacation this week, so this week’s post comes by way of, TYWKIWDBI, a blog of Things You Wouldn’t Know If We Didn’t Blog Intermittently, that recently discovered the Oxford University Press blog, and found an essay on the history of the filler-word “like.” (Not necessarily the Facebook-style usage, but more like, um, like this.) Full-time UST MBA students learned about ways to eliminate this filler word and others during Launch Week. Here’s some background from these additional blogs:

I had assumed [like] was a recent innovation.  It is not.
The ubiquitous modern parasite like can perhaps be traced to early usage, but the causes of its unhealthy popularity in today’s American English remain a mystery… (more…)