Are you often not sure what younger speakers are talking about? Don't fret! They are not speaking English but another language, Dorklish, that once was a poor cousin of English, but which today appears to be the dominant language in America. Modern Dorklish is perhaps most easily recognized by the ubiquitous and superfluous "lyek" and "yunóh."

In Dorklish there are few adverbs; you simply use an adjective where in English you would use an adverb. Thus, for example, a speaker of Dorklish would say "Drive slow" instead of "Drive slowly" and "He speaks Dorklish good" instead of "He speaks Dorklish well." About the only use of adverbs in Dorkish is to split infinitives, as in the familiar expression "to boldly go."

Nouns, most notably "fun", are regularly used as adjectives in Dorklish, leading to particularly annoying comparatives and superlatives such as "funner" and "funnest."

The French have had a strong influence upon Dorklish. While in English one says "It is I", in French one says "C'est moi." The speaker of Dorklish follows the French lead, and says "It is me." However, when an English speaker would use the word "me", a speaker of Dorklish is liable to use the reflexive pronoun "myself", as in, for example, "He asked myself."

One of the trickiest rules of Dorklish concerns the destructive and and the destructive or. A speaker of Dorklish says "John went to a movie" and "I went to a movie", but "Me and John went to a movie." Conversely, a speaker of Dorklish says "Please do it for me" and "Please do it for John", but "Please do it for John and I." Examples of such usage can be found in movies that were shot as far back as the middle of the twentieth century.

The Dorklish habit of saying, for example, "without you paying" instead of "without your paying" began to creep into the language long ago. The typical speaker of Dorklish could not tell you that a gerund such as "paying" is a verbal noun. Nor is the word subjunctive in his or her vocabulary. In Dorklish you should sing "If I was a rich man ..." using the past indicative "I was" rather than the present subjunctive "I were."

Whereas in English the word "less" refers to quantity or degree and the word "fewer" refers to number, in Dorklish the same word "less" refers to quantity, degree or number. For example, a speaker of Dorklish would say "To eat healthy one should eat less French fries." This sentence also illustrates the use of an adjective instead of an adverb. Also, please note that whereas an English speaker would say, for example, "a few years" or "a small number of years", a speaker of Dorklish says "a few number of years."

Occasionally the pronunciation of words is different in English and Dorklish. The English word "nuclear" becomes "nukular" in Dorklish, while "similar" becomes "simular" or "similiar", like simulate or familiar. Some people in high places speak so!

By keeping these rules in mind, you can better understand the younger generation, and you might even be able to speak Dorklish well enough that people will think that you are a real Dork.