We have a neighbor freshman college student, friend of my daughter, who visits our home on an almost daily basis over the past ten years. Starting about four years ago, every time she said "like" as a placeholder, which was in about every other sentence and sometimes multiple times within a single sentence, I would quickly jump in ... "well, if it is LIKE X, what is it ACTUALLY"? Sometimes for fun, I would utter a sentence where I would put the word "like" in front of every verb and adjective, then finish the sentence with a double "like". It cracked her up but made the point.
I am proud to say that by junior year in HS -- that's at least 100 corrections -- she would do it, then realize I was there, stop herself, say "OK", remove it, and complete the sentence properly. It's never too late to learn to remove worthless placeholders (like, umm, uh, so, so like, yeah, etc.) from our speech, and certainly from our writing.
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