“In one of the megachain bookstores, a woman asked a young clerk for the author of Like Water for Chocolate. After the salesperson had spent five minutes searching and still could not locate the famous title, the customer realized that the young man had been looking for Water from Chocolate.

It’s like … you know.

Nowadays, three speech patterns of the younger generation squeak like chalk across the blackboard of adult sensibilities:

• The sprinkling of like throughout sentences, like, you know what I’m saying?

• The use of another species of like as a replacement of the verb say: “I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s like totally wicked awesome.’”

• The replacement of say, a verb of locution, by go, a verb of locomotion: “She goes, ‘Hey, that video game was totally cool.’” Linguists call this use “quotative,” an introduction to direct speech. ”

By Richard Lederer on http://www.vocabula.com/index.asp