My ten-year-old daughter and her slightly younger friend are now having conversations that at first appear to be taken from Beckett’s juvenalia. In the car on the way home from school, for example, my daughter described something gross, and her friend said:
“Ew.”
And then she said: “I’m like: ‘Ew.'” And then again, with a faint adjustment of tone: “I’m like: ‘Ew.'”
And my daughter said: “You’re like: ‘Ew.'”
It’s either a depressing generational verbal tic–or the universal dawn of pre-adolescent self-awareness.