Like it or not

It seems to me that the mantle for irritating words has well and truly passed from basically and totally to like, and I have been trying to pin down precisely what the objection might be.  I am very mindful that historically, older generations have rarely approved of new generations’ linguistic creativity, and also that as educators we have a duty to lead students into as deep and subtle an understanding of language we can.  So what’s up with like?

The most obvious meaning of the term is simply as a synonym for say. Michelle Obama used the word this way on the US TV Tonight Show to talk about the problems of going out on a date under the heavy-handed auspices of presidential security apparatus: “He’s like, ‘I’m going to take you, and we’re going to go out on a romantic dinner.’ And I’m like, ‘Is the ambulance coming?’” That seems very much in keeping with the way words morph all the time – nice used to mean foolish; bully used to mean superb; and believe it or not, girl once meant a child of either sex; nothing unusual there.

To see it this way, however, would be to lose some nuance.  Using like this way – linguists call it a quotative like – has a slightly different tone and is not a simple synonym for says.  It actually has a slightly different meaning –  encouraging a speaker to embody the participants in a conversation.   Had Obama said “He said, ‘I’m going to take you, and we’re going to go out on a romantic dinner.’ And I said, ‘Is the ambulance coming?’” she would be more remote, less intimate (read it out loud if you aren’t sure) .   Like better allows for the dramatization of differing perspectives; and it better implies some kind of tension.  This means, of course, that the quotative like usage is not a vacuous one, but is instead governed by its own linguistic conventions, contrary to what one hears from the Usage Police. I seem to recall I go having much the same role in the UK in the 1990s – “Yesterday I met an old pal and I go ‘Where’ve you been?’”

Another usage I never use, but actually like (sorry) very much is the like as hedge, indicating that what follows is approximate or exaggerated.  I only live, like, 3 minutes from school or I, like, died! In these cases the word tells us something about the intentions of the speaker – and how aware they are of the accuracy of their statement.  This use of like is actually remarkably easy, compact and useful in speech (though not the written word yet). All good stuff.  

It is, though, perhaps as a meaningless linguistic twitch that like is least appealing.  Here criticism and correction is warranted: “I, went to the park, like, and like, she was, like, just there, like waiting, like”. This is not a new usage, funnily enough: Robert Louis Stevenson used it in the novel Kidnapped: “‘What’s like wrong with him?’ said she at last” – in 1886. But then it tended to appear only once per sentence; and so perhaps it’s just sheer repetition that wears us down so much. That is, however, a feature of the spoken word, and I suspect many of us would have a surfeit of ummms and errs or other irritating mannerisms in our speech is we transcribed every word.

I wonder if my objection, at root, is simply an aesthetic one – which is fair enough, of course, though hardly sufficient to warrant imposing my views on anyone else. For myself, I often marvel at the way students are able to switch between dialects – from the apparently sloppy playground chatter, to more formal discussions in class, to highly formal (perhaps ritualised might be the right word) speech demanded in academic presentations and writing. I marvel, but I have ceased to be surprised by it, and now see it as a matter of purpose. In everyday interactions, language is a social tool we use to signal friendship groups, intentions, moods all sort of other vagaries. Linguist Stephen Pinker notes that a person who knocks over a glass may be a klutz, but if he says “whoops” then at least we know he did not intend the outcome and regrets that it happened. Saying the true, and in a sense more direct “I would like you to know that I regret that” would show a very poor understanding of the subtleties of language and indeed, social interaction. 

So now when I hear like a lot, as I sometimes do, I am careful to think hard about what purpose it is serving, and I try to avoid being one of what the great usage writer Henry Fowler described as “the modern precisians who have more zeal than discretion.”   I am more keen to explore its meaning than simply get rid of it; to open a conversation rather than issue an edict.  Of course, after some thought there are times when the word is best erased – in these cases I have no problem being like ‘you should get rid of it’.