the proliferation of the term "and stuff like that"

This post is actually my motivation for creating a blog to begin with. The world around me appears to be getting dumber at an ever more alarming rate. I consider myself fairly forgiving when it comes to intelligence. For those with a less than stellar IQ, I tend to appreciate their other qualities, and I certainly don't consider them as lesser people. I do, however, have my limits. Just this evening, for instance, the short-lived game show "1 versus 100" was the background noise of our lives, and I'd listen in to catch the occasional question to fuel my disgust of the general public. The question this evening read something like this:

"If Santa were to parallel park his sleigh, what part would be perpendicular to the curb?"

A. The side
B. The other side
C. The back

This is essentially testing whether one knows what the word perpendicular means, and even if not, if they can even successfully determine which one of the answer choices is not like the others. The contestant struggled with this for, I kid you not, four minutes. Finally, she decided on answer choice A. This was bad enough, and sent me into a minor rant about how stupid people have become. As my rant subsided, they revealed how many of the 100 people against whom she was competing also missed the question. FIFTY THREE. Yes, FIFTY THREE. The majority of the people in that group did not know what perpendicular means. But I digress...

My original intention here was to express my disgust for what I find to be the ever-increasing population that adds the term "and stuff like that" to the end of every other sentence. Not only that, it has morphed from a synonym of "etcetera" to the new "sort of", used to fill the air with noise while the next lot of drivel is put together in the speaker's mind. If I have time, I may attempt to do some web research on popular search engines to determine how the number of matches to the search "and stuff like that" has increased each year over the past decade. I realize that this result will be skewed, as this is likely more of a verbal issue than a written one, but it may provide some insight.

Until then, if you share my disdain, go rent (or download) Idiocracy, an admittedly stupid movie by Mike Judge that explores a future in which Darwinism has failed and the stupid rule the earth.