How 'Like' Can Be Both Annoying and Useful

Recently on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” an American student at Duke University’s campus in China described a class exercise about what the country would be like in twenty years. Referring to some Chinese students in the course, she said, “They wore like Chinese military garb to the presentation. And they had like the whole banner that said, ‘The 10th anniversary of Taiwan's return to China.’ And that was like a big deal for the Taiwanese students. They were like extremely upset over it.”

In fact, the student used the word “like" four times in a 44-word statement. And she used it in particular, recognizable ways that weren’t traditional. By “traditional” I mean “like” as a verb (“Jim likes Mary”), a preposition (“Sally looks like Betty” and “he reminds me of artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer”), a noun (“cookies, donuts, and the like” and “my post got 25 likes”), a suffix (“he has many mentor-like qualities”), a comparative complementizer (“It felt like we were in outer space”), or even a conjunction, which was controversial in the 1950s but is now fairly widely accepted (“Winston tastes good like a cigarette should”).

To call the student’s “like”s “controversial” would be to overstate their reputation, by a lot. In 1982, Frank and Moon Unit Zappa released the song “Valley Girl,” which contained passages like,

Like, oh my god!

Like, totally!

Encino is, like, so bitchin'

There's, like, the Galleria

And, like

All these, like, really great shoe stores

Roughly since then, “like” has been Exhibit A when older people criticize the way young people talk, generating more dislike than even uptalk, vocal fry, and sentence-starting “so.” 

'Like' has been Exhibit A when older people criticize the way young people talk.

Complaints are most frequently heard from members of two groups. 

First, parents, such as the singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright, who in “Cobwebs” (1995) calls the word “an assault to my mind's ear” and sings, “when I hear it/I can't stand it/Especially coming out of the mouths of one of my own kids.” 

The second group is college professors, one of whom wrote in the "Chronicle of Higher...

Keep reading on Quick and Dirty Tips