The virus we should all fear

I haven't updated this for a while. Probably nobody gives a shit, but somebody might check it every now and then to see if I uploaded some weird drawings. Indeed, very weird things have been drawn by me between the last update and today, but I haven't uploaded them because of a combination of laziness and fucking kids using Facebook on the computer labs with scanners when they should be letting me do productive things, such as publishing strange sketches that perhaps nobody will see. The point about kids on Facebook brings me to what I want to talk about. What the fuck is up with college kids? In essentially every class I hear the professors warn us about swine flu/type A flu/H1A1 flu/or whatever the new obscure flavor-of-the-month code is now. But I have observed a far more alarming trend prevalent in young people (18-24, a range in which I fall). The youth that is supposed to be the leadership of humanity in future years is losing the ability to speak. No, this is not a bigoted tirade against immigrants, because these people I am referring to do not speak any better than "fresh off the boat immigrants". In fact, it can be argued that it could be worse. In my environmental policy class, students are encouraged to participate in class. Underclassmen are typically over-enthusiastic about getting full credit of the large chunk of the final grade the 5% participation/attendance represents for one of the grading methods (at the end of the semester, two methods are used, and the lower one is discarded. The second method does not include participation). As such, when one of these kids participates, it makes me cringe. Not only because they usually have nothing worthy of contribution, but because their vocabulary seems to consist of 20 words, and that might be overestimating. In particular, the word "like" is preferred. I decided to do a little experiment and count the number of times every participant uttered such word (bonus points when starting a sentence with that word): for a participation time of 15-20 seconds, the aforementioned word was pronounced, in most cases unnecessarily, between 5-16 times. Six fucking teen times! Is this not alarming? What is going on? Is this the MTV virus? The Facebook virus? Stupidity virus? Whatever it is, I'd rather get swine flu. That way I don't have to go to class and expose myself to that terrifying disease.
Some of you nice-word nazis might be thinking I have the "profanity virus". Firstly, I don't use this much profanity normally, but I am that concerned. Secondly, I'd rather say the word 'fuck' than 'like'. I 'like' it more.

As a side note, this trend had been previously observed a few years back in my old journal: http://bitchyrant.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!B3EEDBDBD7B6B151!549.entry and http://bitchyrant.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!B3EEDBDBD7B6B151!552.entry , but I had forgotten about the potency of the decay of human speech as I submerged into a bubble of core curriculum classes where speaking is highly discouraged implicitly, and its students are, for the most part, immune to this stupidity virus. Now I emerge from this bubble, and I want to run away.