About half-way through this past school year I decided to ban my sixth- and seventh-grade English students from using that mea culpa of the new millennium, the phrase “my bad,” to admit to any kind of mistake or failure. This came right after I banned them from using the word “like” as if it were a kind of verbal punctuation mark (as in the typical middle schooler sentence: “Because, like, you know, like, I don’t, like, really like like him—I just kinda’ like, like him.”).

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