Like, just no
Serious students of language have a hard time knowing what to do with this all-too-familiar use of like. They call it “filler,” and it’s hard not to regard it as something bordering on the sublinguistic, an almost intolerable torturing of the magnificent instrument bequeathed to us by Shakespeare and his successors. For those of us who teach and spend a lot of our time talking to young people, the endless supply of self-interrupting likes that litter their speech and impede the flow of their thoughts can be very hard to take.
I’ve been noticing that lately – the way the filler-like has expanded to the point that it excludes other words almost entirely. How do I notice it? By being on buses, overhearing those Young People. It’s no longer the single “like” that introduces a noun or verb, it’s a stuttering of “likes” all through a short sentence, such that there is more “like” than anything else. I don’t know how they can stand each other. They don’t have time to say anything of interest, because they have to fit in so many empty “likes.” They’re making noise at each other, but they’re not talking.
The redoubtable linguist John McWhorter has written entertainingly and well about the ubiquitous like, and he mostly approves of it. One might even be justified in saying that he likes it. Yes, he is willing to admit that its use does betray a certain diffidence or “hesitation,” a fear of “venturing a definite statement.” But in the end, he contends that like as verbal filler is better understood as “a modal marker of the human mind at work in conversation,” of thought in motion.
I can buy that when it’s used relatively sparingly. I used to do it myself. But expressing hesitation ten times in one short sentence is way beyond the necessary or desirable. It becomes just maddening clutter that displaces actual meaning.
I wonder if it has something to do with text supplanting speech as young people’s primary mode of communication. The speed of writing on a phone being slower than the speed of speaking, and requiring less mental exertion (emojis!), it’s left young people’s speech construction mechanism severely underused, and therefore underdeveloped and sluggish. Yet another unintended consequence of smartphones and social media. We can’t even talk anymore!
Interesting. Ban emojis!
–Geoffrey Nunberg
If Um, Uh, and Mm weren’t hard enough to listen to, now we have Like. Sign of the times.
Well it stumbles and it falls off of almost every tongue
Give a listen and you’ll hear
It’s workin like a landmine in almost every sentence
It’s an assault to my mind’s ear
Yeah it might have started back with Jack Kerouac
Probably more than likely it was Maynard G. Krebs
It’s the four letter word that used to mean ‘as if’
And the meaning’s covered in cobwebs
Cobwebs
Used to be a preposition then it was a conjunction
Now it’s used as an audible pause
Oh I hate it when I hear it especially when I see it
Gotta stamp it out there ought to be some laws
College boys valley girls mall rats grandmammas
Everybody’s misusin that word
I heard it four times in one poor little sentence
It was the saddest sound I ever have heard
Cobwebs
Cobwebs
Cobwebs
I suppose you could blame it on my generation
Chickens from the 60s finally comin into roost
I’ve been sayin it myself for over thirty years now
Just to give my cool quota just a little bitty kind of a boost
But when I hear it
I can’t stand it
Especially coming out of the mouths of one of my own kids
It’s been taught and, God,
What have we wrought?
Give a listen here, what do we dig?
I prefer ah or er
You can rest assured
If you’re sayin what you mean then it don’t mean a thing
It’s just an ugly little four letter word
Doesn’t anybody care or am I the only one?
Am I just stuck back in some kind of a past?
Maybe it’s harmless but it feels like a virus
And it sounds like it’s catchin on fast
Cobwebs
Cobwebs
Loudon Wainwright III
“Cobwebs”
Reasonably certain I use it quite frequently as a “young person” (another term that seems to be obsessively used, pet peeve) though I’ll admit to somewhat atrophied social skills since I rarely have verbal interactions with people other than myself during a work week. That and what seems like aphasia impeding those conversations I do have as a source of worry.
I deliberately use filler words and phrases online to soften my writing style, which has been called abrupt and aggressively direct and even (*gasp*) pedantic. Beginning a sentence with a “Like” or an “I mean” is semantically pointless, but I get the impression that doing so gets people to respond less defensively.
Arty, this “like” shit has been around a long time, way before phones & emojis.
I raised this issue with creative writing students this spring. One student–undoubtedly the top student in class–argued vociferously for the use of “like.” She seemed to think academics were being too hard on its use. My stance is that people don’t care much how you use language in face-to-face encounters, but people being interviewed on the radio SHOULD FUCKING KNOW BETTER. Public radio frequently has “guests” that like the fuck out of like.
“Like” as a dialog tag just kills me: “I was like,” and “she was like.” Nonetheless, it’s pretty fascinating from a linguistic point of view.
Sometimes “I was like” and “she was like” does introduce a mini-performance as opposed to just swapping for “I said” and “she said.” It would be interesting to know the ratio.
It’s barely tolerable when over-used in speech, but now, maybe owing to the use of speech-to-text or maybe because people are writing exactly as they speak, it is everywhere on social media, and it drives me nuts.
As for McWhorter’s ‘its use does betray a certain diffidence or “hesitation,” a fear of “venturing a definite statement’, the same claim was made for the equally irritating ARI, (Australian rising inflection). I don’t accept that reasoning for either ‘like’ or ARI. So far as I can tell, both habits – along with the ubiquitous ‘so’ – began with the so-called ‘celebrities’ of reality TV and on-line ‘influencers’ and spread like viruses.
Ophelia, #9. Using ‘I was like’ in place of ‘I said’ is fine*, it’s the ‘I was in like the diner and had like a burger’ that grinds my gears.
* certainly preferable to ‘I turned round and said…and she turned round and said…so I turned round and said..’ Too dizzying for this old man.
For decades, I’ve noticed ‘like’ as a verbal stop-gap to prevent interruptions when the speaker is marshalling her thoughts. It has often been a sign of someone who is used to being spoken over, and never allowed to finish a sentence without at least one interpolation from someone else. Perhaps parents and schools have been remiss in their duty to teach youngsters turn-based conversation. Perhaps they’re surrounded by constant interruptions – the TV never turned off, frequent notifications from various tech devices – and so are on high alert all the time. I don’t know.
However, there’s one thing that I do know – that I prefer overhearing ‘like’ as interpolation to ‘fuck’ and its derivatives, which seemed to be popular in the nineties.
I do a lot of editing of audio and video interviews, and it’s incredible how many ums and uhs people of all ages use. It’s far more than you might realize. Some people say um more than once per second and they don’t even realize it. Most of those ums aren’t even noticed by listeners because our brains are able to filter them out. When you have to force yourself to listen for them so you can cut them out, their sheer frequency is dumbfounding. It’s gotten to the point where I can recognize the waveform shape of an um on sight. Show me the visualization of an audio track and I can instantly see where the snips and splices are going to be. (It’s like The Matrix. I’m the Neo of editing out ums. Whoah, I can see the code, man!)
All of that is to say that maybe at least some part of like’s recent ubiquity is that it’s replaced um as the word that signals, “hold on a second, there’s a laggy connection between my mouth and my noggin. My brain’s bandwidth is low right now and it’s still gathering the parts of this sentence.”
As a linguist, I’m with McWhorter, though as a speaker I find myself a bit annoyed by overuse of “like”. But this kind of statement bugs me: “an almost intolerable torturing of the magnificent instrument bequeathed to us by Shakespeare and his successors.” Shakespeare didn’t bequeath us a language, he just used the language around him far better than anyone else before or since. But I can just about guarantee you that if you went back to late 16th century London and listened to the people speaking, you’d find a lot of verbal tics similar to our “likes” and “ums” and so forth. Shakespeare kept those out of his plays, but if you think everyone spoke magnificently, go back and re-read a blowhard like Polonius.
Probably because most of us are thinking through our answers as we’re speaking, especially if the questions are novel. And there’s the issue of holding the floor–in a lot of cultures, any silence in the conversation is a signal for another interlocutor to jump in (and others where overlapping talk is the norm–the scene in “Annie Hall” with the split screen of Woody’s family dinner and Annie’s is a hilarious illustration of these differences).
I have a hard time regarding this as a ‘kids these days’ issue, frankly. While I do know of one teen girl who uses the word far too often, her sister, elder by one year, rarely uses it at all.
And I know for a fact that when I was a young lad in the 1970s, reading MAD Magazine’s “The Lighter Side” cartoons, there were multiples mocking young adults for using “Like” all the time–which, I suspect, pushes the phenomenon of overuse back well into the 60s.
And I agree with those who say that it’s basically been adopted as preferable to ‘um’ and ‘ah’ and the ilk, since it is at least a real word.
Language changes, people. Or should that be language changes people?
It was ever such, and history is littered with examples of one generation impugning the speech/grammar of a different generation.
As a High School student in the ’60s, I was shocked to hear girls, generally recent southern European immigrants, constantly saying “She goes, then he goes, and I go” where “go” was standing in for “said”. It soon infected the speech of almost all the girls in my cohort. However, when it came to the part we were tested on, grammar, spelling, and expression, those girls performed quite well.
It is easier to be clear and concise when writing as there is time to pause, edit, rethink and rewrite. Not so with speech, particularly speech under pressure such as having a microphone thrust in your face.
As WaM pointed out above, Shakespeare was a great user of English and I am sure that is because what we have from him was carefully edited. Shakespeare is also credited with being the first recorder of over 1700 words and the originator of some forty original words and phrases, no doubt quite a few caused confusion for his audiences.
Who at the first hearing would have understood “It’s all Greek to me”, “In a pickle”, or “Wild goose chase”? I imagine that some of Shakespeare’s audience felt ill used by his audacious and bare faced use of multitudinous new words. Today we find it admirable that he dexterously added these words to English while the sanctimonious of his time were hostile to his change of language.
Italicised are words Shakespeare is credited with inventing.
WaM @ 14 – Ya I cringed at that Shakespeare bit too. Was tempted to … it out. For the reasons you point out and because I dislike that stilted pseudo-Johnsonian kind of writing (“bequeathed?” give me a break) just as much as I hate the too-many-likes kind.
The ums while thinking through our answers issue…back when I was getting invited to speak at various things I had a major dread of going “um” constantly so I tried hard not to, but I think that probably slowed down my delivery a lot. I’m always in awe of people who can talk to an audience both cogently and briskly.
Rev, sure, language changes, and people can comment on the changes. “Like” has been a filler since at least the 1950s, and it can still be true that some people use it so often that it clogs their speech like weeds taking over the vegetable patch.
Ophelia: There’s absolutely nothing wrong with replacing hesitation markers with silence. As the song goes, just enjoy the silence.
Perfect illustration.
The punchline is interesting – “and how confident she came across.” [sic] It’s true. A hail of likes and ums is clutter, and clutter does not come across as confidence. Ability to make sounds, yes, but confidence, no.
Then again maybe I’m just arguing in a circle, because the reason it doesn’t come across as confidence to me is that it sounds so teenagery, which is where we came in.
This thread is in need of a dishonourable mention of the “uh, uh, uh, uh, uh” that a lot of (old, male) politicians do when they are buffering, but absolutely determined to not give someone else the opportunity to speak. The occasional “like” would come as a relief, frankly.
Good one.
@Rev,
I’m suspicious of any claims that Shakespeare invented X words or phrases, just because he provided us with the first record of them. He was a popular entertainer, after all, and by most accounts very successful, and you don’t get to be a successful popular entertainer by befuddling your audience. I’m sure he created quite a few turns of phrases, and perhaps some words, but they were probably understandable to his audience.
@Ophelia,
I was thinking more about everyday speech than public speaking, but anyway I have a horrible time reading from a script. When I have to give presentations, I find I’m most fluent if I’ve taken time to run through what I want to say in my mind a few times, with maybe one or two practice presentations. But then I almost always get to a point where I’ve forgotten what I meant to say, or aphasia kicks in and that’s when I break out the “ums”. Or just fall silent while I poke around in my brain trying to find the words.
“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with replacing hesitation markers with silence. As the song goes, just enjoy the silence.” – Nullius in Verba
But it can be hard for people to learn to do that, or even realize they should try – particularly when they hear it so often in other people’s speech – and it does feel like we hear a lot more different people speaking than we used to (if only in 30 second clips)
The internet is a powerful leveller (reducer?). Along with the rise in ums and likes, there are interesting shifts in pronunciation, one example being “tuh” (rhymes with “duh”): hearing people say “to” (rhymes with “two”) seems to be increasingly rare.
WaM @ 23 – the Shakespeare bit – yes and no. He was a popular entertainer but also an elite entertainer. Ben Jonson pointed out his ability to do both in his goodbye poem. His audiences must have been willing to tolerate some difficulty, or the plays would have been made simpler and simpler over time. King Lear has a lot of stunningly basic dialogue that rips your heart out, but it also has the other kind. Hamlet has lots of the other kind and it was popular from the beginning.