So like, she like, won.

Last night, like many other people, I was watching the Olympics on TV. I was glued to the women's gymnastics, the one sport that never fails to bring feigned high-intensity media drama that exists only on the television and not in real life. Every other sentence starts with "As a girl in a devistated Russia..." or "In a poor Romanian village..." Whatever. Just show me the uneven bars and shut the hell up. Thank god for the Mute button.

Anyhow, I'm watching and it's down to the last rotation. I eagerly await the competition, and during a commercial break I decide to look up (on the internet, of course) how tall Svetlana Khorkina (aka, Ostrich Girl) is. She seems to tower over other gymnasts with her long neck--I mean legs--but I know she can't possibly be all that tall. Turns out she's 5'5". I wanted to compare that to the tiny Romanian I became a fan of: Oana Ban. She's a mere 4'6". For the hell of it I checked Carly Patterson, a very median 4'9". And right there, right next to her face, was the unignorable, suspense-ruining headline "Patterson follows Hamm with another all around gold."

After yelling, screaming, and cursing that I accidentally saw the result online two minutes before I would have seen it on TV, I decided to watch anyway. Surely I was in for a good performance. So I did, and I saw the "Texas dynamo," the "next Mary Lou" stay upright on a 4" piece of wood. Amazing.

So she wins, people clap, Ostrich Girl cries, blah blah blah. And eventually the news lady, who was thankfully NOT Elfie f-ing Shlaegel (Elfie? Elfie? Come on now, please, what kind of a name is that?), rushes over to Carly Patterson in proper Olympic style: microphone in hand, overly dramatic questions firing away before the athlete has even caught her breath. This always annoys me, but this time what annoyed me more was the answers. "Carly, you just won gold. How do you feel?"

"I'm just like, wow, like, I just like, won the gold medal. I don't even like know how I feel right now." I was HORRIFIED at how this girl, this child, was speaking. She must have like, said "like" like, 42 times in 6 seconds. Now, I know it happens. "Like" is a frequent word out of my own mouth, but you damn well better believe that if someone stuck a microphone in front of my face so I could tell the world how I felt about a gold medal, I'd switch to Non-Like mode before I spoke.

Yeah, I know, I know. She's only 16. Every 16 year old girl in America speaks this way now, and she's no different. But that's exactly my point. Are they like, teaching this in grammar lessons now? Does the Blue Book now have a chapter assigned to Proper Use of the Word 'Like' in which students are instructed to place "like" before every major adjective, adverb, and verb, or in place of commas? What is like, going on here??

What's worse, non-Americans are watching this interview with distraught looks on their faces as they try to translate these strange little syllables that occur 6-8 times per sentence. "Habib, go get my dictionary. What means this 'like'??" And Brits just shake their heads, thinking "first they dumped our tea, now they are ruining our language."

Yes, maybe we are. But that's what makes America great. You can like, totally butcher the language, and like totally sound like an idiot on television but like, we don't care, and we'll like, still totally give you a gold medal anyway. Oh and by the way, like nice dismount.