The reason I’m in New York is to profile Bob Silvers, who was one of the founders and is still one of the editors of the New York Review of Books. Yesterday I was talking to his cofounder, and co-editor, Barbara Epstein who is, I suppose, the ranking priestess of high culture in the USA. She told me about the founding of the magazine: her then husband, Jason Epstein, she said, “was, like, kids, let’s put on a show”.
I’m, like, oh my, Barbara!
How long before the first foreign dictionaries start seriously conjugating “I’m like, he’s like” with the past form “I goes, she goes”, etc; the future tense, I suppose, is still based on “said”.
I collect instances of “like oh my god” because it can be used to express so many different thoughts and emotions. I the buffyverse it comes on rising inflection of hysteria, to express mild surprise. But last night, walking back to y hotel and listening to the conversations around me, I netted an entriely new variant. “I’m like oh my God” with equal weight given to “oh” and “God”, and both words pronounced on exactly the same low note, with a completely level inflection. This seemed to be expressing real desolation. I thought for some reason of a man coming home to find his basement flooded.