Why Don't We Like It When People Say, Like, Like?
Is it a meaningless verbal tic, Valley Girl Speak, or at least sometimes an intriguing new way of expressing oneself?
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The two women were seated next to me on the subway. I guessed that they were both in their early to mid 20s. They were engaged in a spirited conversation, only pieces of which I could understand. One of them was doing most of the talking, loudly.
“And then he was, like, yo, you don’t play anymore,” she said. “And I’m, like, sometimes you just don’t see it and then he was, like, no, no. I don’t see you playing it. You’re not playing anymore. I don’t see you playing. Okay. Like, how often are you home?”
I eavesdropped some more. I couldn’t follow the train of the conversation — it seemed to hop from subject to subject and chunks of it were drowned out by the noise of the subway — but the word “like” was sprinkled liberally throughout. I don't think five seconds passed without one of them saying it.
Full disclosure upfront: for a long time, I have been annoyed by people who lard their speech with "like" in the colloquial form that has become increasingly popular. Maybe I'm cranky -- okay, I am cranky -- but it really bugged me. And it's not just me. Friends say the same thing (and, no, not because it's my requirement). An article in the British newspaper, The Guardian, in 2020 reported that "scores of recruitment specialists and public speaking coaches have bemoaned the words' rise and say those who use it prevent themselves from getting opportunities."
There are even apps that monitor how often you use the L word, and websites with helpful hints on how to stop saying it.
Usually when I would overhear someone uttering a string of "likes," I would try to tune out, which of course only resulted in my noticing it even more and growing ever more agitated. This time, on the subway, it piqued my curiosity (even as it annoyed me). I wondered: Where did it come from? Who uses it most? In what ways? And why? And how does one acquire it? So I went looking for answers.
I was surprised how much research, analysis and general musings have been devoted to the subject. And, in the end, I came away accepting it, but also gaining a certain respect for the creativity and ingenuity with which it is (sometimes) used.
Photo credit: Getty Images
It's widely accepted that there are at least six different uses of the word like. Like can be a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, suffix. And, like it or not, it is inescapable. It has become so common that when I taught English to a group of non-native English speakers who had only lower intermediate proficiency, several of them were using it.
There are two traditional uses of the word "like," whose roots go back nearly 1,000 years. The first is the verb, such as in the sentence, “I like ice cream.” The second is an adjective, “She looks like a movie star.”
Then there are these ostensibly new versions of 'like":
Like as discourse marker
This just means it's a momentary placeholder while the speaker formulates what to say next, much like "well" and "you know." In its more dramatic variation, it's kind of a pregnant pause before describing or saying something important, such as, "I went into the subway and I saw, like, a rat practically as big as a dog."
Like as hedge or as an approximation
As a hedge, "like" is invoked to express doubt. "The food at that restaurant is, like, pretty good." That lets the other person know the food is okay, but, hey, don't hold me to it if you don't like it.
In the second form, "like" expresses an approximation of something in such a way that the listener knows you are not being precise. If you were to say, "It was, like,100 degrees when I went to the beach," no reasonable person is going to come back at you saying, "That's not true. It was only 96 degrees!" The "like" qualifier means it was very hot and roughly 100 degrees.
Like as discourse particle
This "like" is similar to the discourse marker and approximation but is subtly different from both. It isn't really used to break up the sentence or as an approximation though it sounds a little like that. Here's an example: "I think Heineken is like my favorite beer."
Like as quotative
This is one you cannot help hearing almost daily unless you stay home or cover your ears when you're out in public. In this context, "like" is used to recount what someone said, but not necessarily as a verbatim quotation. More often, it's intended to loosely recreate what was said or just what was meant or, sometimes, just what the speaker was thinking but didn't actually say. It's always in the present tense. The conversation that I overheard on the subway is a great example of meaning and structure:
"He was like, you, you don't even play anymore."
"Like, how often are you home?"
It turns out most of these uses of "like" are not all that new. Some are, in fact, quite old. Researchers have identified examples of it being used in the 18th century in ways similar to how it is today. For instance, in a 1788 novel, Evalina, there's this line: "Father grew quite uneasy, like, for fear of his Lordship's taking offense."
In On The Road, the classic Fifties "beat" novel by Jack Kerouac, he wrote: "How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung up on like inhibitions and grammatical fears." In fact, this form of "like" was part of beatnik hipster lingo. "Like, cool, man."
Photo credit: Getty Images, Moon Unit Zappa and father, Frank, 1982
What is relatively new is the quotative form of "like" (e.g., "And I was, like, are you kidding?") This one reputedly was born in the 1980s as part of California Valley girl speech. It was popularized and lampooned in the 1982 Frank Zappa rock song "Valley Girl" in which his teenage daughter, Moon Zappa, spews a stream of lines such as, "She's like, Oh my God, bag those toenails.'"
"The following decades witnessed the rapid spread of the colloquial like both within and beyond the United States, to the extent that it has become a feature, to varying degrees, of all main spoken varieties of English today," according to the blog, The Linguists at Antidote.
What's interesting is that even as "like" spread far and wide, it has come under fire. The more ubiquitous it becomes, the more people don't like it -- including people who themselves say it!
The complaints are familiar or predictable. Critics say it is vapid and boring, that it stigmatizes people as not articulate or unintelligent. Others complain that lacing what you say with "like" can make you sound immature or tentative or unconfident.
In an on-line article, How To Stop Saying the Word "Like," Patrick Munoz and Hannah Madden wrote, "Overusing that word can cause your friends and co-workers to make unfair assumptions about your education and intelligence levels."
Their tips included tapping your leg every time you catch yourself saying like ("Keep the movement small so it doesn't distract you from what you are saying.")
What led me to question my own objections were a number of articles that presented persuasive defenses of the word, including convincing analyses that it can be an effective way to express complex and subtle ideas and emotions. I also read some compelling arguments that it's often used to stereotype and criticize women while exempting men from the same opprobrium. “The word ‘like’ has a superpower,” says Alexandra D’Arcy, a linguistics professor at the University of Victoria in Canada and author of Discourse Pragmatic Variation in Context: 800 Years of Like. “It’s able to do almost every job in the English language. I can’t think of another word that behaves that way. No other word has that flexibility.”
Defenders say that from being meaningless, "like" can communicate complex ideas. As a quotative, it "allows the speaker to retain the vividness of direct speech," according to linguists Suzanne Romaine and Deborah Lange.
"Far from being an annoying teen-age linguistic tic, the quotative like actually may be part of a much broader, sophisticated literary-linguistic trend," wrote my Bulletin colleague Malcolm Gladwell 30 years ago. It's only become more so since then.
Like can be used for emphasis. It can mark or foreshadow something of particular importance in a sentence. It can communicate emotional nuance and, some supporters say, it can help engage more closely with the person you are speaking to.
A team of researchers examined nearly 300 conversational transcripts and in the study they published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology concluded that "conscientious people" and those who are "thoughtful and aware of themselves and their surroundings" are more likely to use discourse markers, including the "like" form.
Then there is the charge of sexism in how tolerant and intolerant we are of who is saying it. There is, I think, a popular notion that the heaviest "like" abusers are young and female. The Guardian article cited an unnamed American law firm that sent only its female employees a memo that told them to "learn hard words" and "stop saying like."
In her book, Wordslut/A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language, a fascinating account of how language has been used to marginalize and discriminate against women, author Amanda Montell says research shows that while women do use "like" as a discourse marker more often than men, otherwise there's little difference.
"According to a 2003 analysis ... of phone conversations, men overall use like in its many forms more frequently than women do," she wrote. "People don't seem to care or even notice when men talk this way. Only when it comes from female mouths does it cause such an upset."
Photo credit: Getty Images
What I would urge all of us to be aware of is that language is dynamic. It evolves. It changes. We replace manners of speech, words and expressions with new ones. If we didn't, we would all still be speaking like characters in a Shakespeare play. I like Shakespeare but no one talks like that anymore (forsooth?), which is probably a good thing and, in any event, was inevitable. Yes, any expression used too often can become tiresome and grating. Think about "well," "you know," "um," or Samuel Jackson's f-bomb tirades. But I think it's probably time to lighten up on "like" -- and I'm talking to myself here, too -- and welcome it into the English lexicon.
Cover photo credit: Getty Images