Overuse of “Like”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Patti Potter. I’m calling from Fort Worth, Texas.

All right, what’s up?

Well, I have a question regarding my daughter’s newfound habit.

She’s been using the word like, in my opinion, overusing the word like.

And I just wondered how kids started this habit and where it came from.

And better yet, how can we stop it?

How old is your daughter?

She’s only 11. She’s very bright.

She’s very articulate, straight-A student.

But when she starts saying the word like between every other word,

I find myself getting very distracted.

And I can hardly listen to what she’s saying because all I hear is the word like.

She’ll say like, like, like, you know, like, just in the middle there, right?

She doesn’t say it like he said, like, this is that and that.

Because there’s a couple different kind of likes here.

I’m trying to get at what kind of like.

Do you have an example exactly of how she might have put it?

Well, you kind of nailed it.

It goes like this.

Well, we were like in the lunchroom, and we started laughing, and she got really mad.

All I hear is the word like, and I can hardly listen to the story.

It’s like that Gary Larson cartoon of what dogs hear, you know,

And the woman’s scolding the dog named Ginger, but all the dog hears is,

Ginger.

Exactly.

And I must admit that when I’m around her and she starts doing it, I have to hold back because I start doing it.

It seems to be contagious.

And then my 8-year-old starts doing it, and we’re just, we’re all blithering idiots by the time it’s over.

You’ve touched on to something there, though.

She’s 11.

She is probably looking at the behavior of girls who are much older than her and kind of adopting their mannerisms.

Maybe so.

There’s a really good chance that she picked this up from older girls, right?

That’s my guess, that she’s seen it either on TV or she’s been around some older girls who are doing it.

Let’s talk about this in two ways.

You have basically two questions here.

Your first one is, how does this start?

Where does it come from?

And your other question is, how do we stop it?

The first one’s pretty easy to answer.

We know that this kind of like, which is called, in linguistic jargon, a discourse marker,

Dates to about the 1700s, believe it or not.

It has very little to do with the Valley Girls,

And they may have used it, but it spread without them,

And they didn’t necessarily cause the whole thing.

And it actually, believe it or not, has a role in the speech.

It does things. It has a function.

It often has meaning, and it changes the way

Their words are perceived by the listener,

Not just because it repulses you,

But because it intentionally sows a little bit of doubt in there.

It lets you know that what she’s saying is approximate.

If she’s telling a story and there are a lot of likes, it’s because she’s not detailing exactly what was said or exactly what was done.

But she’s kind of given the summary or kind of gliding over some facts in order to make the narrative tighter or just kind of get to the point.

So that’s one of the things that she could be doing with a like.

So it’s useful.

It does have its uses.

I do know the reason I asked about her age and the reason I suggested that she was picking it from older kids, it’s addictive.

Once you hear this being used, you have a tendency to overuse this tool.

It’s your new hammer, and everything looks like a nail.

That makes sense to me.

The next part, as far as getting rid of it, there are two things to do.

First, wait it out.

She’s going to change her speech.

The older she gets, the more she learns, the new friends that she gets,

The influence that she gets from you and other adults in her life,

She’s going to change, and that kind of the fad of saying like will disappear eventually.

The second thing to do is if it really bugs you,

Although I don’t necessarily recommend this, tape record her.

Maybe when she’s not looking.

And then play it back for her later.

And she’s probably going to be horrified at first at the sound of her voice.

But when you point out the likes, she’s probably going to be horrified about them too.

Anything other than nagging sounds good to me.

Yeah, nagging’s not going to do the trick.

Don’t want to do that.

No, nagging’s got no more effect on the speech of teenagers than the weather does.

That’s right.

I knew that much.

Well, thank you.

You’re welcome, Patty.

Thank you so much for giving us a call.

All right.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

You know, Grant, I remember reading an interesting essay by Jeffrey Nunberg, the linguist, about like.

And he was saying he was observing some TV interviews with I think they were high school or middle school students after a tragedy.

And he noticed that nobody was using the word like at all because they were recounting this thing that had happened that was very, very serious, very traumatic.

And vivid.

And vivid.

And there wasn’t this distancing.

There wasn’t this sort of equivocating.

You know, it was a very, very straightforward narrative.

And he had been thinking about the word like, and he was watching those interviews,

Specifically listening for like he didn’t hear at once.

And that makes sense to me.

Right. It’s exactly what we’re saying.

Like is used when there’s some doubt about what you’re saying

Or if it’s an approximation of what really happened or was really said.

But there’s a show out of Los Angeles on KCRW that you somehow.

Somehow.

When someone is trying to express an idea that’s not completely clarified

And they’re basically articulating it for the first time in response to a question they’ve never heard before,

Somehow plays a large role in what they have to say,

Because it makes sure that the proper doubt is sown about what they’re saying.

It has a function, it has a role, but it doesn’t stop it from being annoying when it’s overused.

A little weaselly word. Now I’m going to be hearing that word all the time.

Thank you very much, Grant.

Somehow.

You’re very welcome.

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