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Can you remember way back to New Year’s Eve when most of us resolved to improve ourselves here in 2008? It is a ritual we try to observe for a time, but daily routines and regular periods of frenzy get in the way of our resolutions.

It’s just as well that we don’t carry out our resolutions. Think how boring it would be if all of us were slim and didn’t smoke cigarettes and always drank in moderation or not at all.

Think how dull we would be if we all had our socks organized by color in a drawer designed for that purpose.

Think how cookie-cutter-like our lives would be if we all went to bed as early as we planned and stayed home as often as we should.

Imagine how little time we would have for really fun stuff if we ever actually did read all the great books.

So if you haven’t already made and broken your new year’s resolutions, here’s one simple one.

We need to start a war on “like” and other word usage outrages perpetrated by our kids.

From rug rats to teenaged nerds, from slackers to prodigies, American kids from Seattle to Key West are trapped in a world in which the most frequently spoken words are not “a” or “the.” Nope. Scientific studies, printed in “Dumbing Down Daily,” the teen magazine, show that the most commonly used words by youngsters between the Terrible Twos and Twenty-somethings are “like,” “awesome” and “cool.” Close behind are “as if,” “totally” and “random.”

Take that “random” thing, for example. You and I would use random in a manner close to the standard dictionary definition, “proceeding, made, or occurring without definite aim, reason, or pattern: the random selection of numbers.”

My most beloved 13-year-old relative says it in sentences such as, “That movie was awesome but the ending was kinda random.” Hmmm.

“Like” may be the worst. At a recent holiday gathering I began noting and mentioning it every time our grandsons used the word like. Not when they might say, “I really like my present,” but when it would be a word that precedes every noun or adjective in a sentence.

Examples: “I’m like exhausted” or “This turkey is like awesome.” The kids quickly became annoyed with me for interrupting with my observations, such as, “You’re like exhausted? Does that mean you’re not really exhausted but something like exhausted, such as, maybe very tired or bone-weary or even enervated?” It didn’t really do any good so I stopped and asked their Mother why they talk that way?

“It’s a peer thing and I’m not sure why,” she said, “but if I interrupted them or corrected them every time they said ‘like” they’d probably stop talking to me at all.” Another word against which we should try to eliminate when used improperly is, “incredible.”

On TV, in mass media publications and in many American households, classrooms and workplaces, “incredible” no longer means not credible. It now means “awesome” or “amazing” or increasingly, “wonderful” “exciting” or maybe “dramatic.”

So our mission is clear, our cause is just. Even though I doubt it will be any easier to get the kids to stop saying “like” than it will be for me to get taller and slimmer in 2008.

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Chris Curle is a former news anchor for CNN and for ABC TV stations in Atlanta, Houston and Washington, D.C. E-mail: chris@chriscurle.com.