Totally, Like, Whatever

April is National Poetry Month, I learned yesterday while listening to NPR. Yay, NPR! They always have such interesting stories. Anyway, they played a terrific piece about this guy, Taylor Mali, a spoken word champion. He read one of his poems, called "Totally Like Whatever," and I really liked it. Here's a portion of it:

Totally like whatever, you know?

In case you hadn't noticed,
it has somehow become uncool
to sound like you know what you're talking about?
Or believe strongly in what you're saying?
Invisible question marks and parenthetical (you know?)'s
have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences?
Even when those sentences aren't, like, questions? You know?

Declarative sentences -- so-called
because they used to, like, DECLARE things to be true
as opposed to other things which were, like, not -
have been infected by a totally hip
and tragically cool interrogative tone? You know?
Like, don't think I'm uncool just because I've noticed this;
this is just like the word on the street, you know?
It's like what I've heard?
I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions, okay?
I'm just inviting you to join me in my uncertainty?

What has happened to our conviction?

You can read (and listen to) the rest of the poem here. It really spoke to me. Sometimes I think I've become a complete idiot when it comes to the way I talk. Although I don't do the invisible question mark inflection thing Mr. Mali is talking about, I pick up little tics from whoever's around, and although it may be cute, I can see how it might make me seem ... silly at times, or even less intelligent than I am. Most of all, I think I've become careless with the way I speak, and I want to put a stop to that. I want to sound as though I've chosen each word carefully instead of letting it all slip and slide out with a jumble of likes, sort ofs, kind ofs and totallys muddying up what I'm trying to say.

You know?