LA’s kinda, like, cheesy

“’Power without responsibility — The prerogative of the harlot!’ says the proverb.
‘Sex without commitment — the prerogative of the
Whore-master!’ says Bachchoo”
From Bekaari ke Dohey by Bachchoo.

My motel room in Los Angeles has clean sheets, a grubby carpet, very silly pictures, a clean, functional bathroom whose showers and taps work perfectly, a “kitchen” equipped with a sink, a fridge, a table, two plastic chairs and a microwave oven. No electric kettle, no gas or electric stove or hob to cook on and a persistent smell of stale carpet.
One of my only friends in LA comes to visit on my first day there and calls my accommodation “crummy”. I sort of know what she means, but out of linguistic curiosity about American usage ask her what her description implies.
“It’s the kinda place guys bring prostitutes for a two-hour occupation”, she says.
“In Britain we’d call it ‘a knocking shop’, but I assure you it isn’t. The rooms, I happen to know, are booked for weeks, or if it’s overnighters, it’s families passing through Ventura Boulevard”, I said.
In this city one is dependent on motor transport. The motel is two hundred yards from a convenience store from which one can buy expensive bottled water. The supermarkets for other needs are a couple of miles in each direction. No car, no shopping — or, at the worst, a long walk with paper bags. I find myself wishing I had brought the microwave cook-books that they give away when you buy a microwave oven in London. I’ve never used one or looked at it and don’t know anyone who has. The free cook-book is, I suspect, strictly an adornment for shelves as most kitchens are equipped with other ways to cook. Can one boil eggs in a microwave or will they burst and cause mayhem?
I ask my friend to use “crummy” in another context and she does, it means run-down or shabby. My Oxford dictionary (yes, I sometimes carry one!) defines the word as “colloquial” and says it means “dirty, squalid, inferior, worthless”. “Would you call it ‘cheesy’ instead of ‘crummy’?” I ask her, thinking of the indelible odour of stale carpet.
“You could, but that’s, like, more for like movies”, she says.
The word has never settled into my vocabulary. I don’t know how to use it. My dictionary says it’s to do with the smell of cheese and therefore “stale, nasty and inferior”. I don’t suppose it does any good to argue with the Concise Oxford, but it doesn’t precisely mean any of those things when Americans use it. It’s one of those words I am sure I need to use because the texture and smell of cheese certainly suggests metaphorical application — it’s only I can’t quite see where I would use it. As far as I can tell, when applied to films, it means they are sentimental, melodramatic and in bad taste. But then don’t we all eat cheese and crave a bit of parmesan on our pasta?
While India invents usages for English words in both languages: “Prepone” and “Tension mat le”, it seems to me that America, while borrowing from Spanish and other languages, delves into the deep memory of English and fishes up some usages.
It always annoys me when my daughters answer the standard polite query about their health — “How are you?” or variants thereof — with “I am good”.
I have taken it to be a thoughtless Americanism and one that expresses a ridiculous conceit. Mother Teresa could perhaps say “I am good”, but the rest of us are certainly not entitled to make such a judgment about ourselves. Surely it’s to be left to Ahura Mazda to decide after each one of us ascends to the heavens. I diligently tell them to say that they are well or, if they have to use the word, to say they are in good health.
A vain hope; American usage rules, Okay? But when the same conceit was voiced in American accents, an echo of a different usage seemed to follow. In England, when a builder does a job for you he/she includes in the bill a final item called “making good”. It doesn’t mean that the builder has restored your installed WC to pristine morality, but only that he/she has patched up and painted over the destruction done as an inevitable part of the installation.
This “making good” means restoring to its original condition — as our Lord Jesus Christ says, “Thy faith hath made thee whole”.
I am, through this visit to the new World, hearing the word intoned over and over again, convinced that saying that one is “good” is not part of the overweaning conceit of Americans but simply a delve into the memory of language.
Even so, that meaning of good, while remaining in some usages, is an inappropriate answer to a routine enquiry about one’s health. It’s, like, kinda cheesy.
Which brings one to the universal teenage usage of “like”. It is to the American spoken lexicon what breathing is to life. Speech, at least teenage and even silly adult speech, cannot go on without it. I have been irritated by its use for a long time. I have often said to Tir, my youngest, that she should only use the word when she saw a simile in nature or when she was speaking about affection (“Ben likes Jerry... I like Ben and Jerry’s...” etc.).
She wasn’t to use it to punctuate her sentences or use it to pause for her thoughts to catch up. Now I’m, like, not so sure. The sojourn in Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood, has taught me something about the unreality of America. When Shakespeare said “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”, he was predicting Los Angeles. American reality is confounded with American film. The medium is more than the message, it is The Word as it was in The Beginning and shall be in The End.
When a teenager says, “I was like ‘Hello?’” she is seeing, in that part of her brain which formulates expression, a movie in which she has become the player and has to speak and act “like” that player. “And she was, like, ‘Whatev-er’!” The conversation is in quotes. It means “I was speaking as though I was playing a role — like the larger than life person on the screen”.