I am sure you have, like myself, noticed the change in our English language over the last decade or more. Some of those changes, of course, are part of a living language and are to be expected. Some are also simply cultural. Whether it’s part of ethnicity or regionalism or simply a fad of the time, I am okay with that or “down” with it if you prefer. Although, it just makes me shiver a bit when someone is unable to say a complete sentence without one or two “likes” thrown in. I get confused. When, a young woman for example, says “It was like the most awesome concert ever”, does that mean it was similar to the best concert ever or was it, in fact, the best concert ever? It gets even more confusing when she says, “It was like the most awesome like concert ever”. Then I have to ask, was it similar to the most or was it the most and was it similar to a concert or was it actually a concert?? Anyway, that can’t be helped and I accept that I am just too old to add it to my speech pattern.  I am not, however, okay with the way in which the basic structure of our language is being misused and even, in my mind, abused. When I hear, not just street talk, but educated celebrities, professional people speaking as though they were never taught grammar in all the eight, twelve, sixteen years of schooling I am irritated. I hear highly paid news anchors, responsible public examples for us all, medical people from nurses to surgeons ending their sentences with a preposition and I wonder who taught them in elementary school? Or worse, it seems that almost everyone from every walk of life, including those who should be an example to us all, say things like, “Me and my friend went to the beach.”, or, “Me and my father had dinner together”, I wonder have they never been taught to finish that sentence and hear how it sounds? Are they that selfish that they need to always put themselves first? Just the other day I saw a written response to a client by a well known therapist who apparently never heard of the difference between “to” and “too” and “two”. I’m sorry, living language or not that is simply sad and outrageous at the same time. I say all this not simply to rant but to warn. If you are an author and you are creating characters you want to be believable you best listen to what is happening to our language. If you want your teen aged or even college aged student to be authentic then you better fill their dialogue  with the word like and always have them put themselves first in every sentence and, dare I suggest it, gift them with many other grammatical errors. I hope you find that as difficult as I do because that would suggest that you may have had a decent teacher in your grade school and beyond and perhaps there is someone under seventy who knows how to speak and celebrate their language of choice. Okay, I guess it was a rant. But like really man!