Louis de Bernières Slams 'Like' as Worst Verbal Filler
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- Louis de Bernières published an essay railing against 'like' and other imprecise verbal fillers, coining the fake Greek term 'misosaskopeslexis' (hatred of pointless words) to name the affliction
- De Bernières traces his disdain for sloppy speech to his father, who was contemptuous of the transatlantic accent and vocabulary (groovy, far out, heavy) fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s
- De Bernières recounts a sixth-form talk where one student's overuse of 'like' stretched a five-second remark into five minutes; he privately begged her to stop
- The word 'like' is the most common grammatical filler, more frequent than 'um' or 'er,' according to de Bernières
- De Bernières says he can no longer listen to Radio 4, which he feels has been 'rejigged' for younger speakers — a development he likens to 'being hit repeatedly on the head with a foam rubber mallet by a stoned Barbary ape'
- The spread of the generic Thames corridor/Essex accent and its glottal stops represents, in de Bernières's view, a continuing tragedy of lost regional dialect — he himself speaks Mardle, the dialect of Norfolk
- De Bernières lives in the Norfolk countryside, where he is separately irritated by litter from junk food outlets; he muses whether junk food produces antisocial behavior or merely attracts those already inclined to it
Why it matters: A bestselling literary novelist (Captain Corelli's Mandolin, 1994) is using a major-platform essay to publicly weaponize the generational complaint about 'like' as verbal filler, tying the phenomenon to the broader loss of British regional dialects like Norfolk Mardle and the perceived dumbing-down of institutions such as Radio 4.
