Thanks. Never imagined it can be a muse but you did great summarizing its manifestation.

The "uneducated" younger generation is really a pain to listen to. They start each sentence with "...and I was like", then "he was like".

It ruins my day every time I hear it. You can't correct them b/c that is considered "disrespectful".

May I add one more vocal pet peeve? Since when do we end a sentence with "right?". I am hearing it more and more. Does anyone know how it got started?

ROFL. If I had been drinking milk, well...

Still can't believe an elected official could be that ignorant, but then again I'm confronted by people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and I am pointedly reminded that yes, yes there really are more of them. Then comes the sobering thought: and they vote!

They say that about spell check too!...it's a bit scary if your dumb phone actually did...think about that.

I'd use different words all the time just to piss it off!

"Like" flowered in the period you suggest. Like, gag me with a spoon.

Here's a poem I wrote while stuck in traffic in February 2006.
Modern Verse
–Or–
Poetry Joins the English Language Going to Hell in a Handbasket

He goes, I think, “Ya wanna drink?”
“Like watcha got?” “I got this rot.”
Ya know like um, fer sher that’s dumb,
And then ya know, it’s like they go,
“Want Coke and rum?” So, she goes, “Um
“Like sher ya dope, but like I hope
That Coke’s diet.”
He goes quiet.

Only if there is a lot of filler noise: Um, like, Guam is, ya' know, um a small island, and um, putting a lot of um soldiers there will um make the island ya' know, capsize.

I am a writer, so I need my bag of tricks to make it faster and easier. Easier is important in order to avoid repetitive motion stress/carpal tunnel, &c.
My tricks include programmable keyboards, programmable button boxes, AutoCorrect, power mousing, and voice input.

As to the news, yes, it's getting worse. Too many Breaking News items about a bear in a tree or some cute dogs or that Nancy Pelousy and Upchuck Schumer still hate Trump.
Then we have news consisting of last night's comments by the station's newscaster/teleprompter reader. And finally, providing only a few minutes for a guest to make a complicated point before, "Sorry, we're out of time—we have to show you this cute cat picture, and then tell you that Batshit Nancy has declared walls to be immoral."

You are correct. I don't know how to set my own replacements.

A lot of words I use come up underlined but Autocorrect can't do anything with them.

How do you set your own correction?

You'd think it is an easy enough effort to present your sentences correctly spelled. We have the spell checker, thanks to technology. When you write, mistyped words are underlined in red.

Is it too much of an effort to click on it and have the program correct it?

Thanks for reminding me. Yes "ya know" is the other one that makes me reach for the remote.

While "ya know" has been around for decades (I remember hearing it back in the 70s) the "like" phenomenon is more current. It can't be older than 2 decades the most, unless I am mistaken.

The latter one has infected people from Hollywood (I hear "celebrities" pepper their sentences with it which reflects on their single digit IQ) to the teenage generation where you hear nothing else.

I have a feeling a lot of whats written is done by BOTS. I have no proof of that, but it just seems that way. Much harder to understand.

I just got done reading a history of the United States from 1815 to 1848. In there the author mentions that that time period was known for its great orators - people who spoke not only in government but in the public sphere with not only eloquence but passion. The few examples made clear to me that the people of the 1820's were far more used to hearing and understanding poetry in the spoken word due to the combinations of word and phrase. Then the telegraph was invented which allowed for greater diversity in printing and distribution. While I don't think the quality of speech declined tremendously in that time period, it may be that over the past 150 years that our proclivity for the written word has somewhat eclipsed our acknowledgement and devotion to the spoken tradition. While I still admire those with the gift of "turn of phrase", I wonder how much of that is also culturally trained out of us due to the proliferation of written communication?

And again in a Saturday Night Live skit, years later, when Strother Martin was the host.
"At Camp Beau Soleil, the campers are forced to learn French by the brutal camp counselor, Le Capitain, but a camper named Luke is determined to escape." April 19, 1980

That will be my new word of the day: embolalia. Thanks!

Question: does that make someone who hedges when speaking falsehoods an embolaliar? =D

My iphone supposedly learns the words I use, but I dont think it works very well at all.

Not to mention, Spellcheck doesn't know half the words we use...

Interesting. It wasnt obvious to me that writing had morphed into something that needed to be done faster and faster and more efficiently.

I do have the feeling that its harder to understand news articles in the last few years. I have postulated that they must be written by robots according to rules some editor sets out. I find that they go from what one person says to what others say- back and forth and I get lost as to who said what. Causes me to reread carefully and take a lot of time for that.

I also notice that news articles on google news are excessively long and seem to repeat stuff over and over to fill up the required word count. Annoying.

I have nearly totally stopped watching and listening to news on radio and TV- It seems that no matter what someone does, the TV/Radio people take exception to it in order to create controversy. If Melania wears a dress of one color, they complain some other color would have been more appropriate . Boring.

I am not a writer, obviously, and tend to pay more attention to what I am trying to communicate, then how short a time it takes me to accomplish that. Maybe its just I am getting old...

Filling verbal space with frequent “um” / “like” / “ya know” is called embolalia, and ya’ know, it like drives me like, ya’ know, like nuts.
I switch radio or TV stations when a speaker presents the third “ya’ know” in a minute or two, or at the first instance of two of them consecutively placed: “It shows my ya’ know, ya’ know, creativity.”
For in-person conversationalists who drastically overdo “ya know,” I’ll strike back with “no, I don’t know” at clang response speed to display by example how irritating their embolalia is.

"When 900 years old you are, look as good you will not! Hmmm?" :)

Well said.

Overly casual? "A preposition is bad to end a sentence with."
Or do we get too pedantic? That's something up with which I will not put."

This found quote applies:
"Sloppy spelling and incorrect homonyms in a purely written forum send out the same silent messages that soiled clothing would when addressing an audience."

That is a major problem for the lazy, sloppy "writers." I rarely send text messages, and never without proofreading.
I compose most of my writing in Microsoft Word, where I use AutoCorrect extensively, not so much to make corrections, but to minimize the amount that I must type to produce a desired result. Few Word users know to set (and document) their own replacements. Much of what I write goes in looking like text message shortcuts that transform automatically into real content. Though available for long words, the big gain comes from short words that I use far more frequently.
Fe, wn I tp, te chh tt look like sm absurd msg tx im become wt wuda reqd more time aa effort.
Or with my cistomized AutoCorrect:
For example, when I type, the characters that look like some absurd message text immediately become what would have required more time and effort.

Too few follow these rules: Don't noun verbs. Don't verb nouns.

Strother Martin, "Cool Hand Luke." 1967.