Like Louis de Bernières, I too have misosaskopeslexis (what a good word, which he defines as a hatred of pointless words). Various irritating uses of language on Radio 4 also send me bonkers, as does the incessant gabbling (The hill I will die on: I really don’t like ‘like’ – or other imprecise and redundant speech, 13 June).
“Like” is dreadful, but so is the grimly common use of “so”, spoken with heavy emphasis at the beginning of a sentence. It grieves me that many of the academics interviewed (surely people who one hopes don’t drop litter out of their cars in country lanes) use it when asked for their opinions by Radio 4 interviewers, making the beginning of a quite ordinary answer sound very portentous.
