That’s, like, a societal thing
I was hanging out at our state university with a colleague, capturing Gen Y opinions about mobile phones for some videos we’d be posting.I got a chuckle out of how many times students said “like.” I stopped counting when I hit 47 – easily – in the span of a half hour of interviews.
The standard question we were asking went like this:
“What does your cell phone mean to you and how would you react if you didn’t have it?”
The answers were very consistent:
- They’d be devastated.
- They’d be lost (some literally, some figuratively).
- They’d have a bad day.
But the glue linking nearly every comment was the word “like.” Here are a few examples:
“Not having my cell phone, would, like, make me feel, like, so disconnected.”
“I can’t imagine, like, getting through a day without it.”
“Looking back on times when this, like, actually happened, it was, like, not cool.”
“My cell phone, is like, a part of me. It’s, like, my social network, know what I mean?”
“Like talk” has been going on awhile. Clueless featured this dialect in 1995 and real-life valley girls predated the movie.
How’d this happen? How did “like” become such a superfluous synonym for “er” and “um?” Why is it so difficult to construct a sentence without it? I'm not being high and mighty about the "like" thing. I probably say it more than I realize.
I guess it’s, like, a lasting societal thing. Linguists will, have to figure out why it, like, isn’t going away, know what I mean?
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