Recently I helped assess senior project presentations at Helix High School. I was amazed at how many graduating seniors continued to, like, overuse the word “like.” Before my retirement, students would ask me if I had, like, a pencil. I would ask them if they wanted something “like” a pencil or if they actually wanted a pencil. — Joan Hosaka, La Mesa
In one of the megachain bookstores, a woman asked a young clerk for the author of “Like Water for Chocolate.” After the salesperson had spent five minutes searching and still could not locate the famous title, the customer realized that the young man had been looking for a book titled “Water from Chocolate.”
It’s like … you know.
Nowadays, two speech patterns of the younger generation squeak like chalk across the blackboard of adult sensibilities — the sprinkling of like throughout sentences, like, you know what I’m saying, and the use of another species of like as a replacement of the verb say: “I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s, like, totally awesome.’ ”
Linguists call this second use “quotative,” an introduction to direct speech.
Professor Mark Hale, of the Harvard University Department of Linguistics, says of these speech markers: “This is national in scope. It is not idiosyncratic in any particular part of the country. But it is observed most often among younger people, usually younger than 25.”
In my view, the burgeoning of like in American discourse appears to be a verbal tic in the linguistic mold of uh and you know. It offers the speaker’s thoughts an opportunity to catch up with his or her onrushing sentences or to emphasize important points. Take the statement “I didn’t hand in my book report because, like, the dog ate my CliffsNotes.” Here like is an oral mark of crucial punctuation that indicates “important information ahead.”
According to Professor Hale, increasing numbers of speakers press into service like for say as a badge of identification that proclaims, “I am a member of a certain generation and speech community.”
Hmm. My professional rule of thumb is that all linguistic change is neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so. Still, the promiscuous employment of like stirs my concern about the state of our English language.
To most of us, like is a preposition that means that something is similar to something else but is not the idea or thing itself. As Joan Hosaka points out in her letter, dusting statements with a word of approximation encourages half-thoughts. I fret that the permeating influence of like makes imprecision the norm and keeps both speakers and listeners from coming to grips with the thoughts behind the words. “I’m, like, a supporter of human rights” lacks the commitment of “I support human rights” because like leads off a simile of general likeness, not a literal statement.
I believe that it is not a coincidence that the quotative like as introductions to quoted speech has accompanied the metastasizing of like as a rhetorical qualifier. I sense a fear of commitment both to direct thought and to the act of communicating — saying and asserting one’s observations and opinions. Whenever I hear a young person — or, as is increasingly the case, an older person — declare, “She’s, like, ‘I’m, like, a supporter of human rights,’ ” I ask (not I’m like), “Is she really committed? Did she really mean what she said?”
“Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast,” declared the philologist Max Muller. To blur that line by replacing verbs of speaking with verbs of simile is to deny the very act that defines our kind.
I’m, like, it’s totally uncool.
Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com verbivore.com