A exclamation indicating disgust. “Val-speak” was an idiom created in the 1970s by so-called Valley Girls, reputedly materialistic and self-centered young women who lived in California's San Fernando Valley (outside Los Angeles). Their vocabulary and speech patterns swept the country, propelled by popular music, television shows, and such movies as “Clueless” (based on Jane Austen's novel Emma). Like other fads, linguistic or otherwise, Val-speak disappeared almost as quickly as it had burst on the scene. Where once the staple “gag me with a spoon” (meaning that something was awful enough to induce nausea), was widely heard, it's gone the way of “well, dog my cat” and other archaisms. That's not to say that all Val-speak has disappeared. “As if ” (“that's not going to happen”), “duh!” (“that's obvious”), and the ubiquitous “like” are heard wherever the English language is used . . . and misused.