Girl 1: So, like, what were you up to this weekend? By the way, those jeans look, like, completely amazing on you! They make you look, like, 10 feet tall.
Girl 2: Thank you! I had an awesome weekend actually. Like, I went to that new club on Princess Street on Saturday night which was, like, so much fun. The DJ was, like, so talented, like the best I’ve ever heard. What about you? Did you, like, get together with that guy you were, like, telling me about last week?
Girl 1: Omigosh!, I’m like SOOO glad you asked me! I saw him on Saturday, but when I called him the next day he was like, ‘But I’m busy hanging out with the guys and I don’t…’
Okay, so perhaps the above conversation is slightly exaggerated. But, whether on the bus, in line or sitting in class at 8:30 on a Monday morning, we’ve all been unwilling eavesdroppers on people who seem to replace every other word with “like.” Although few of us would go so far as to claim that anyone who overuses “like” is unintelligent or linguistically uninspired, most of us, whether we it it or not, have derisively counted how many times a peer has dropped the sinful word into a class presentation, or rolled our eyes at how frequently a media personality has thoughtlessly interspersed their speech with “like.” There’s a widespread stigma surrounding the word, condemning it as useless, meaningless and introduced into common speech by vapid American Valley Girls, later picked up by lazy incoherent teenagers and unintelligent women.
ittedly, this myth contains some elements of truth. For instance, it has been noted that women and adolescents do in fact tend to utter the word with greater frequency than their male or older counterparts.
But, according to recent studies published by linguist Alexandra D’Arcy, there’s much more going on with this interjection and its linguistic reputation than initially meets the ear. Although youth do tend to say “like” more frequently than older generations, the word has been rising in popularity for several decades now, even appearing in the classic Beat poetry of Jack Kerouac. Youth, with their wide variety of slang and experimental tendencies with language, are often years ahead of older generations in catching onto linguistic trends. So the word “like” may be on its way towards being accepted as common parlance as opposed to representative of the degeneration of a higher language due to the laziness of youth—a belief which also haunted the word “cool,” though it is now used by the aged and young alike.
Many linguists have observed that, far from having no practical function, “like” is beginning to fulfill specific grammatical roles for speakers of all ages and genders; “like” can serve conversationally to separate ideas, or to keep a conversation moving and pause-free. For example: Like, I went to that new club on Princess Street on Saturday night, which was, like, so much fun.
In this instance, the word “like” becomes just another space filler, serving as an almost neutral word in the conversation, and fulfilling the same purpose many anti-“like” advocates no doubt currently choose to fulfill with the phrases “I mean” or “you know.” More practically, “like” can also be used to replace “says.”
For example: He was like, “But I’m busy hanging out with the guys…”
Further, it can be used when giving an approximate description, accomplishing the same function as the word “about.”
For example: They make you look, like, ten feet tall.
The myths surrounding language often have less to do with the linguistic function or utility of the words themselves than how societies accept these myths. In the case of “like,” there’s the pervasive belief that classic, established forms of speech are degenerating into slang, and youth and their incoherent and lazy speech are responsible for this shift. This belief affects words such as “like” and ultimately makes both the word and its speakers seem idle, lazy and useless, demoting it to low status in the English lexicon.
In some cases these myths can be more political—for example, although a poll conducted for D’Arcy’s study concluded that about 83 percent of people associate the word “like” with women, the women studied only used “like” a small percentage of the time more often than men, and only within a specific grammatical framework.
The association of the female gender with the word “like” is therefore a reflection of contemporary social opinions of women as perhaps less intelligent and coherent than men, rather than an accurate description of female speech.
A similar instance of social or political beliefs reflected in language myths is condescending attitudes within the UK towards cockney accents. Those with cockney-inflected speech are seen as lower class due to existing class prejudices rather than individual levels of intelligence or education or the linguistic sophistication of the dialect they speak.
“Like,” therefore, is arguably a much more sophisticated linguistic construction than it is given credit for. All this aside, it doesn’t make it any less annoying to hear the latest Paris Hilton wannabe tell the press that she is “like, totally into kabbalah and any other, like, spiritual stuff,” or any less fun counting that student say “like” 53 times in his 10-minute seminar presentation.
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