NOT LONG AGO, when I was back home in the nether-parts of Virginia, I attended a soiree with all of my old high school friends--or at least those who had recently been paroled.

After filling me in at great length about which of my classmates had been married, knocked up, gelded, shot or exiled since our last meeting, they asked me how things were going with the snobs up at Hartford.

Never known for my reticence, I had been talking for quite some time before I noticed that something was wrong; my friends' jaws were hanging much lower than usual, and their eyes were almost fully open.

"You talk funny, man," one spoke up, scratching his head and squinting at me in dull distrust. "Like one of them beach faggots."

"Yeah," grunted in another. "Just like one of 'em. I seen one on CHiP's, and you's just like you was him."

I was about to protest or make some pointed remarks about their speech and grammar when I was hit by the sickening realization that they were right. In trying to overcome my own redneck accent, I had gone overboard.

I had fallen victim to Coolspeak.

WHAT IS COOLSPEAK? Well, it's basically Orwellian Newspeak with a touch of fashion. In 1984, the function of Newspeak is to reduce the human vocabulary to the point where abstract ideas and emotions could not be verbally conveyed. Although there are probably very, very few people in California who have even heard of 1984, the inhabitants of our West Coast have done a better job of destroying the power of our language than the Ministry of Truth could have dreamed of. Take, for instance, this deep and moving conversation I heard on the shuttle bus:

"Marcie! What up?"

"Oh, hey Darcey, you like mean you haven't heard?"

"Like, no?"

"Oh, well like my parents were driving up in Vermont, and there was like this really heavy thunderstorm, and there was like this, you know huge truck full of chickens coming the other way, and like WHAM!"

"Oh, wow, hey, that really like...sucks."

"Yeah, I was like seriously bumming, but then like I found out that my dad had this like giant insurance policy, so I was pretty psyched. I mean, I've been wanting to get a new CD player, and..."

"Cool."