Why do we say “like,” like, all the time? 

There is a word that is the bane of existence for English teachers, parents, and podcast listeners everywhere: “like.” This week on Explain It to Me, we answer a pressing question for our listener, Allison: “Why do I use the word ‘like’ so much?”

Allison is a college junior, and with graduation on the horizon, she wants to sound more mature before she enters the workforce. “When I’ve been in internship interviews or job interviews, I do my best to speak more eloquently,” she said. “Why do I say “like’ so often?”

To tackle this question, I had a conversation with Valerie Fridland, sociolinguist and author of the book Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English. Though often dismissed as a “filler word,” Friedland argues that we use “like” in our conversations for a reason. “The reality with ‘like’ is it has come into our language because it serves some really important purposes for us,” she said. “No one starts using a word because it’s pointless.”

Fridland talked to me about how “like” is indispensable in so many ways, how it entered the lexicon, and if people use it as often as we think. 

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

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I remember being as young as seventh grade and my parents being at a parent teacher conference. My mom and dad said to my teacher, “She uses the word ‘like’ so much. How do we get her to stop?” And my teacher was like, “Oh, my kids do it too.” 

I want to say that when you were introducing that, you’re saying what the teacher was saying. You said “she was like.”

I can’t turn it off!

But it was serving a function for you because that is one form of “like.” It’s what we call in linguistic speak a “quotative like,” and that “like” substitutes for the verb “to say.” What you are doing is saying, “I’m not telling you verbatim what the teacher said. I’m giving you sort of my subjective recall of what she said.” It’s a really useful tool because it allows you more flexibility when telling a story.

That makes sense.

You can use it sometimes to draw attention or highlight. It can also be used to hedge what you say. And a lot of times you use “like” to indicate that this is a subjective estimation of something. So you could say, “He’s like a doctor or something,” which is indicating I don’t exactly know what he does, but it’s something like a doctor.

Then, you can also use it at the beginning of a sentence. And that’s a little different. That’s usually a sentential adverbial, which makes it sound fancy and important, but really what it means is it’s a linking “like.” So when you say something such as “I don’t know what he did. Like, I think he was a doctor.” 

The similarity among all these likes is that they’re all expressing some sort of subjectivity. And that’s the true power of “like.”

Subjectivity is something that’s often frowned on and not taken as seriously as something that’s considered a cold, hard fact.

Absolutely. There are a number of reasons why people don’t like “like.” I think one is because its whole purpose is impreciseness. 

Often we take impreciseness to be uncertainty, but those are not the same thing. Just because someone is imprecise in what they’re saying doesn’t mean they’re uncertain about what they’re saying. Those are actually two very important distinctions. Unfortunately, the people that tend to be associated with “like” use, are also the people that are typically thought of as vacuous, empty-headed and sort of clueless. And that’s young people and women.

Those are also the people that tend to use “like” the most. So you throw in this feature that marks impreciseness on a group that is often associated with being uncertain, being less sure of themselves, being less confident — which is not a fair assessment of them — but still the assessment. That makes for a feature people don’t like.

What is it about the word like that makes it so flexible for all these different uses?

Like is a very, very, very old word. Words shift and change meaning through time. And the older the word, the more often it can do this. 

In about the 13th century, we first get “like” in our language and it is a verb. Then around the 15th and 16th centuries, we start to use it in similes. And then around the 16th century, you start using it as a conjunction, where instead of just being between two objects, you’re expressing similarity between an object and a whole sentence: “He rode the bike like the sky was on fire.” Then, in the 1700s, you start to see it as a discourse marker, often from lower status criminal witnesses or criminal defendants giving testimony in the Old Bailey proceedings in London.  That’s where we actually start to see “like” used this way for the first time.

Who uses “like” the most now?

When we look at studies done in the early 2000s, users under 40 were the most predominant “like” users, and users over 40 used it to a much less degree. It seems to have really come into fashion in the 80s and 90s. 

It has increased in use in every generation since. So is it true that it is very much a Gen Z feature? Yes. And they might use it more than the generation above them, because it has continued to progress in their speech. But were they the innovators? Absolutely not. And was it something that was really a strong feature of the previous generations, millennials and Gen X? Absolutely.