Louis de Bernières: I hate imprecise speech and roadside litter
Author Louis de Bernières expresses frustration with verbal fillers like 'like' and links them to societal issues such as littering from fast food outlets.
Louis de Bernières, best known for his novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin, has shared his thoughts on modern language trends and social habits.
Personal experience
De Bernières, who lives in the Norfolk countryside, says what irritates him most is the litter thrown from car windows on the lane outside his house. The rubbish always comes from fast food outlets, leading him to question whether junk food turns people into antisocial morons, or whether only antisocial morons eat junk food.
He never eats junk food and never throws litter out of his window. However, he admits to finding other ways of being antisocial, such as passing gas, which disperses on its own.
Language issues
What winds him up most about national life is the fashion for imprecise and redundant speech. He inherited this dislike from his father, who was disdainful of the transatlantic accent and vocabulary of the 1960s and 1970s.
De Bernières had a classical humanist education where he was taught how to construct sentences and link them into coherent thought. Now he observes that everyone adopts a generic Thames corridor accent from Essex, which he sees as part of the tragic loss of regional dialects.
Irritating fillers
The most annoying filler for de Bernières is the word 'like'. He recalls speaking to a sixth-form student who took five minutes to say something that should have taken five seconds because she used 'like' so frequently.
He can no longer even listen to BBC Radio 4, as it has been rejigged for younger people who use such fillers. He compares the experience to being repeatedly hit on the head with a foam rubber mallet by a stoned Barbary ape.
De Bernières has coined a Greek-derived word, 'misosaskopeslexis', meaning hatred of pointless words. He admits he made it up himself but thinks it might be useful.
