Recently we read yet another article about the word “like” as used by those darn kids today. We feel like we’ve been reading incarnations of this article since we became aware of the phenomenon, a verbal tic that, like it or not, has been more or less embraced by youths and even adults since the ’60s. However you characterize it — a “filler” word, a nonsense qualifier, or, as we used to insist to our parents, a way of tempering whatever you’re talking about — it’s like, pretty much here to stay.
For proof, we’ve put together a brief history of the most prominent appearances of the “like” craze in pop culture, from a 1920s New Yorker cartoon to Clueless. Indeed, almost as soon as the word rose to prominence, the pop cultural references began to be self-aware, if not flat-out self-mocking. Shaggy’s surfer-dude lingo is already half-ironic, and of course by the time Zappa got his hands on “Valspeak” in the early ’80s it was already something to be cruelly satirized. However, this hasn’t staunched the flow, and teenagers continue to use the word willy nilly, no matter how their teachers wail. Click through to see some of our favorite ‘like’ abusers in pop culture, and let us know how you feel about the word in the comments.
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1. Yesterday Google gave all of its employees $1,000 cash “holiday bonuses” and 2011 salary increases of at least 10%. Are you jealous? [via Business Insider]
2. Cosby Show alum Malcolm-Jamal Warner will appear in an upcoming episode of Community as Andre, the ex-husband of Shirley. Do you think this character will be dyslexic, like Theo Huxtable? [via EW]
3. The creative team behind The Hills and Jersey Shore have reportedly approached Jennifer Aniston about having her own reality series. [via Contact Music]
4. A black-and-white Coke bottle on canvas by Andy Warhol sold for $35.36 million yesterday at Sotheby’s contemporary and post-war art auction — that’s $10 million more than they were expecting it to fetch. [via Yahoo!]
5. Channing Tatum is in negotiations to join Jonah Hill in the cast of 21 Jump Street remake. We’re guessing he’ll play Johnny Depp’s old part from the TV series. [via Deadline]
Bonus Link: Cee Lo Performs “Fuck You” Uncensored on The Colbert Report
1. Kanye West visited Facebook headquarters yesterday to preview new material from his upcoming album, Good Ass Job, which comes out on September 14. (video) [via Vulture]
2. After underwhelming both fans and critics with her performance at HARD NYC, MIA is promising to make good: “Fuck it! im gonna do a free show in nyc when i get back, tho i dont have powers over rain! If u still have the hard ticket u free! xxxo.” [via NME]
3. You’ll never guess how much Chelsea Clinton‘s highly-anticipated wedding is going to cost Bill and Hill. [via NYDN]
4. Adam DiVello, co-creator of The Hills, is upset that the scripted reality show didn’t conclude with his completely fake ending idea: a big reveal that Lauren Conrad was Brody Jenner‘s girlfriend. [via NYP]
5. Ivy Bean, the world’s oldest Twitter user, has died at the age of 104. She had 56,300 followers! (Note: When she was born in 1905, the fastest way to deliver news was a telegram.) [via Daily Mail]
Bonus link: The best advice we’ve ever gotten from Mad Men‘s Joan Holloway.
Today at Flavorpill, we wondered whether guerrilla artists eating meatballs out of potholes are madmen or geniuses. We drank our morning joe out of Mona Lisa coffee cup in solidarity with this installation and ogled more pictures taken by the Hubble space telescope. We wondered how good of a speller Marilyn Monroe was (or how awesome of an editor she must have had). We got super bummed to hear that Lily Humphrey/Bass/Van Der Woodsen/Rhodes might have An Illness, and cracked up at the cheesiest guitarists of all time. We were simultaneously impressed and skeeved out by this “chillingly precise” junior version of The Hills and thanked our lucky stars we’ve never gotten such a sassy intern application. (It would also be denied, and posted on the internet.) We were, yet again, disappointed in Courtney. And then we watched a mini-clip to promote the upcoming season of HBO’s True Blood, at which point we got rilly, rilly excitable again. See it after the jump.
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Anna David’s new book Reality Matters
is a collection of personal essays from noted writers about reality TV shows that have shaped them in some way. If there’s anything more entertaining than experiencing the guilty pleasure of reality TV firsthand, it’s reading a bunch of brilliant people trying to rationalize their obsession with the genre. We asked David about the moment that inspired the project, and here’s what she had to say:
One night when I was watching The Real World, I realized that the show actually inspired me to think about my own life — mostly about how happy I am not to be a semi-ignorant, self-destructive twenty-something anymore. Then it occurred to me that other writers might have their own interesting thoughts about what they got out of whatever reality shows they liked. And since watching reality TV is considered so shameful by such a large segment of the population, I figured that it could be fascinating to turn the standard wisdom on its head and say that no matter how ridiculous some of these shows are, they really do have something to offer.
Which makes perfect sense to us. (For the record, if we’d been asked to contribute it would have been impossible to decide between an ode to 16 and Pregnant or Ruby — and that’s just right now.) After the jump, find excerpts from a handful of our favorite essays. Reality Matters hits shelves tomorrow.
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I’m holding off on Season 4 right now. I started watching a bit of it, but I’m waiting until the DVD comes out because I want to see it all so beautifully mastered. Even if you download the show there is that irritating MTV logo in the corner. It doesn’t work for me that way. It has to be on a big screen with the sound right up. It blows me away…I’m sorry, but whoever invented HEIDI MONTAG and SPENCER PRATT are just…nothing matches it. I’ve never see L.A. look more beautiful in a work of art. There are no movies that are as beautiful as that.
- Thanks for finding this high-brow/low-brow gem, Foster; we love when the two worlds intersect. Also, it’s nice to know that Ellis shares two of our unhealthy obsessions: bad reality TV and Diet Coke.
Today at Flavorpill, we hoped the Nate Silver — the stats geek who was wrong about several Oscar winners — is just as wrong about New York failing to pass the marriage equality bill. We took a peek inside the new New York branch of the Ace Hotel. We liked the sound of Park Chan-wook’s Thirst — a vampire film that premiered at Cannes and got dubbed “a subversive Twilight.” We finally got around to reading Maureen Dowd’s last column, and found it funny that she called Dick Cheney a “rouge diva of doom.” We were grossly jealous of Donald Glover, a recent NYU grad and writer for 30 Rock who will be starring in that new Joel McHale show, Community. We wish we could go see him at the 92Y Tribeca tonight (he’s doing standup with Leo Allen and Eugene Mirman), but we’ve got to clean our apartment. We were frightened by this Russian Whale Tail trend. (And even more frightened by the tags on that post.) We were shocked to realize how long it’s been since Lindsay Lohan was in a real movie. That you know, like played in theaters. And finally, DON’T JUDGE US, but we are totally excited by the news that Kristin Cavallari will be joining the cast of The Hills. Go Team Kristin! Also: My Life Is Average.
News that Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt were married for reals this time hit the Internet over the weekend, which is when I meant to write this little diatribe. Luckily (or not, depending on whether you think reality TV is the devil), I just stumbled across this money quote from Pratt about their honeymoon/swine flu scare that got me back on task:
“We’re definitely wearing the face masks everywhere we go,” Spencer told Ryan Seacrest on his radio show Tuesday. “We’re not playing. I’m not trying to get pig flu! We’re in isolation. We’re in, like, full hiding.”
I’d pay gobs of money to see that ridiculous image. Read More »
1. Matt Drudge only likes to post the Dow chart when it’s sad. [Via Alex Balk]
2. John Hodgman really hates the word “meh,” which we didn’t realize can be traced back to The Simpsons. D’oh. [Via Boing Boing]
3. Just when we’d gotten to used to the idea of Conan flying solo (it took nine years), Andy Richter got all boomerang baby. [Via TV Week]
4. Flannery O’Connor might have been stranger than her grotesque fictional characters. [Via Maud Newton]
5. Michel Gondry + Seth Rogen = Be Kind Green Hornet. [Via /film]
6. Neil Young to tour only tiny Canadian towns this spring. Because he can. [Via Pitchfork]
7. The Hills‘ Audrina Patridge had her house broken into by someone who was wearing a fedora. [Via NYP]
8. There was a Hollywood bidding war over the film rights to a movie that will be based on an unreleased video game inspired by Dante’s Inferno. Universal won — or lost, depending on how you look at it. [Via NY Mag]
HEIDI MONTAG got fired from her fake pr job on THE HILLS. [LIVE]
The hologram version of Will.I.Am made CNN viewers nervous, ANDERSON COOPER giggle. [NYM]
TV GUIDE — otherwise known as the magazine where bad assistants are put to pasture per THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA — was sold for a dollar. Not one issue. The whole company. [TV Squad]
GOSSIP GIRL‘s resident old person BART BASS has a secret 30-year-old brother named Jack who will join the cast this season. Will he hook up with S or B first? [EW]
Three words: Human. Wrecking. Balls. [Defamer]
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Open Letter to The CW: Melrose Place 2.0 Will Work If You Steal the Cast of The Hills
