This week marks a milestone -- a tragic one, some would say -- in the history of American English. Ten years ago this week, the movie "Clueless," starring Alicia Silverstone, was released. And our language was, like, forever changed.

"The interesting thing about 'Clueless' is that the language was basically another character in that movie," says Carmen Fought, linguist at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. "A lot of research was put into it to really capture how Californians talked at the time, and I think that was the first time that people in different parts of the country got a clear exposure to all the features of the California dialect."

"Clueless" spread its share of slang words, including a fleet of synonyms for "good" and "bad." Writer and director Amy Heckerling keeps a list of them in her personal "Clueless" thesaurus.

Heckerling, who loosely based her story on Jane Austen's classic novel "Emma," was out of the country as her movie's 10th anniversary approached, but in the PBS documentary "Do You Speak American?" earlier this year, she read some of the words for "good" from her thesaurus: "kicking, juice, keen, funky, monster, proper, rad, noble." As for "bad": "random, heinous, cheesy, blows, bites, bogus, bunk, brick, bum, bug . . . clueless."

"Clueless," of course, also popularized the interjection "Whatever!" -- with emphasis on the second syllable, and thumbs joined with forefingers extended to make a "W."

"Clueless" didn't invent these words; many were already well-established in Californian speech. In the 1980s, some (such as "like" and "totally") already had appeared in Heckerling's 1982 movie "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and Moon Unit Zappa's song "Valley Girl" the same year. But Fought says "Clueless" may have helped circulate this language like never before.

"Now we're starting to see some sporadic Californian features in other areas of the country, . . . and even as far away as Canada and Scotland," she says. "So it seems very clear that that's something that's been exported from California, and I think movies like 'Clueless' did have a role in that."

Slang words from television shows and movies tend to have a short life span. But "Clueless" may have helped introduce more subtle and durable linguistic features to American English, including the function of the words "all" and "like," as in this line from "Clueless": "This weekend he called me up and he's all, `Where were you today?' and I'm like, `I'm at my Grandmother's house.'"

"All" and "like" are used here as what linguists call quotative markers, introducing a quotation. These words aren't just casual alternatives to "said"; they often have their own function. "Said" precedes an exact quotation, "all" and "like" can also set up an approximate quotation in the tone of the original speaker.

Fought says linguists now need to take a new look at whether movies such as "Clueless" can even influence certain sound changes, such as "oo-fronting." The Californian pronunciation of "oo" is initiated toward the front of the mouth, so that the word "dude" sounds more like "dewd" than "dood." Fought says some Americans outside California have started to adopt "oo-fronting."

Linguists have long rejected the possibility that TV and movies change the way we speak. Regional dialects remain the biggest influence on people's pronunciation and vocabulary; people tend to sound like the people around them.

But many teenagers outside of California apparently have picked up on the kind of dialect Silverstone uses in "Clueless."

"Now there's more dissemination of casual speech [in the media]," Fought says. "I think `Clueless' was really one of the first to get those new trends started and raise the question for linguists."

Fought has done studies that show people associate the California dialect with the state's pleasant climate, outdoor sports and its stereotypical relaxed, laid-back spirit. But what some consider relaxed, others call lazy.

Few words have raised the ire of language purists the way the quotative "like" has in the years since "Clueless." Any tirade about the state of the language is sure to say something about "like" as a plague on the language.

Fought says older speakers of any language tend to have the most negative response to language change. . He says older speakers associate the constant use of "like" with being less intelligent, less ambitious and less serious about life.

"People in their 30s, 40s, and 50s are focused on getting ahead, having a career," Fought says. "To older people, hearing kids talk that way is like, `Oh, they have no ambition.' Of course, linguists know that there's absolutely no connection between using the word `like' and being stupid or having no ambition."

Fought says reading social doom into linguistic change is nothing new.

"Older people have always criticized new words and [ways of speaking]," Fought says. "Go back to the 1950s to `scram' and `be cool,' and people were saying, `The youth are ruining the language.' I'm sure if you go back to Shakespeare's time, people were saying, `sooth sounds so bad, you really should say forsooth.'"

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Nathan Bierma is, like, reachable at onlanguage@gmail.com.