Yesterday I discovered a plot to overthrow the English language. It turns out that a verbal virus has been unleashed on our culture that threatens to destroy nearly 10,000 years of oral communication. This little linguistic black plague has infected nearly everyone in Generation Y, and it’s only four letters long: L-I-K-E.

If you stop and listen to the spoken discourse between your ISU classmates, you start noticing that this word pops up three, sometimes four, times in a sentence. The word is used to weaken a complete sentence (Geoffroy is, like, the sweetest president ever); it’s used as a substitute for “approximately,” or “such as” (There was, like, an infinity of people at the party last night); and it’s used in place of “said,” (And Scott was, like, “Durrr, I’m the opinion editor”).

But despite its multipurpose use, “like” still makes the speaker sound profoundly stupid. I found this out last week when the frustration of Finals Week and research papers became so intense that I did what any guy would do to gain inspiration — go to Avril Lavigne’s Web site.

After logging on to the pop punkstress’s page of quotes, I was in awe of her verbal ineptitude. Nearly every single quote was infected with “like” and “you know.” Her most telling quote showed that young Avril is, like, an up-and-coming ideologue who really wants to, like, help solve problems in the world through her music: “A lot of my songs are just true and honest and it’s kinda refreshing to some people cause it’s not all like ‘Oh Baby’ this and ‘Oh Baby’ that, and it, you know, kinda means a bit more to some people.”

Uh, like, thanks Avril. That was, uh, just, like, so sweet for you to say. But, while Avril contemplates her next power ballad, the English language is devolving from Shakespeare into a bunch of incoherent thoughts loaded with “likes,” “umms,” “justs” and “you knows.” It wasn’t always like this; you’ll never hear your parents, or anyone above 30, utter these phrases while engaging in a conversation.

The problem becomes more obvious if you read some literary classics from yesteryear, like John Locke’s “Of the State of Nature.” In this treatise, you’ll see long, flowing sentences, uninterrupted by verbal clutter, that connect beautiful pieces of thought by endless semicolons; creating paragraphs that take up more than a page, yet never feel excessive; culminating into a single, coherent argument that is as perfectly assembled as a stained-glass window.

But today’s oral and written communication looks less like a masterpiece and more like an AOL Instant Messenger conversation: “Dude! You’re such a 1337 ! Oh wait, I’ll BRB — Oh, BTW, all your j/king has me ROTFL!”

“Like” isn’t only popular among our generation — the word has sadly gained the attention of linguists. Two years ago, a linguist named Muffy Siegel published an article in the Journal of Semantics about the evolving nature of “like.” She said that, although it has no grammatical purpose, it implies exaggeration or uncertainty in the sentence.

She said, “It’s more than just a way to hesitate when you speak, like ‘um’ or ‘ah.’ It implies to the listener, particularly listeners within your circle, that what you are about to say might not be as clear and specific as possible.”

But don’t believe this for a second. Using “like” implies nothing to your audience, except that you sound stupid. It shows that someone has made no effort to think about what he or she was going to say before words start flying out of his or her mouth.

My newfound hatred for the word “like” can be attributed to my media law professor. Her seething hatred for “like” has inspired years’ worth of ISU journalism students. If anyone dared to saying something stupid, like: “Wasn’t Thomas Jefferson, like, the third president?” she would stop the class, humiliate him or her for 30 seconds, then say, “You mean, ‘Wasn’t Thomas Jefferson the third president?'”

Thankfully, there are still people like my journalism professor who understand the utter stupidity of “like.” Hopefully, her message can reach our generation before American English, like, completely enters the Dark Ages.

Oh crap.