Grammar Is Important

I've been saving this story for a while. The other day, the RLA and I were coming home around dusk, and we pulled up to our gate, put the car in park, and the RLA got out to unlock the gate. It's not that we're Luddites, but we rely on a lot of old-fashioned technology: manual can openers, a gate troll instead of an electric gate, a chain-link fence to keep the dogs in the yard instead of zapping them with electroshock... like that. So, the RLA gets out to unlock the gate, and as he does, a big-ass SUV (a Cadillac, I think) driven by a guy with a blue light in his ear goes whizzing past at a much-too-rapid-for -a-one-lane-road clip... almost clipping the side mirror off our car.
Well, it's a small neighborhood, and we know everybody in it, and what they drive, so we knew that this guy was probably lost. And he was, evidenced by his hitting the end of the street, making a u-turn and coming back up the one-lane road, still at a clip, and still almost removing my side mirror.

Well, the RLA lost it, and yelled at the driver that he was a jerk, and that we live here, and he doesn't and we're unlocking our gate, and he can just wait a second, because the RLA is NOT moving the car.

The Cadillac SUV screeched to a halt. The middle-aged driver threw it in reverse and stopped next to us. He reached under his seat (I'm thinking... oh, fucking great. A gun. Now we're in for it.) but only to roll down the window.

He proceded to yell at the RLA and called HIM a jerk and a few other names before coming to the crescendo of his response:

"You," he shouted at us, "are like a spaz!"

Well, that just set us back on our heels. Was blue light man saying that the RLA is a spaz, or was he saying that the RLA is merely spaz-like?

We debated this for several minutes, with me offering the opinion that maybe the word like was just an interjection, as in; "it's, like, you know", even though there was no audible comma or pause. We also opined that the driver was like a Borg, in that he had a piece of electronics embedded in his ear and it was lit up with a blue light. We never did get a definitive answer from the SUV driver, because once we started parsing out his sentence, he seemed to loose interest in us entirely.

But this phrase has crept into our vocabulary, so that everything is now "like". It's like a bridge. You know, it's sort of bridge-like, in that it spans a body of water, but maybe it's not totally a bridge.

I'm like hungry. I could eat, but I'm not ravenous, so I'm hungryish. I'm close to hungry, but I'm not exactly hungry, so I'm only like hungry.

We have been entertaining ourselves and our friends with this for like a month. It may not be a real month, or a whole month. Maybe it has been longer than a month, in which case it is only like a month, not exactly a month, but sort of a month. Similar in time to an exact month and yet, not.

This entry is like done.