“Like” it or not
By Kathy Ceceri
Sometime around middle school, you may find your child coming home and describing her day like this: “She isn’t like, really crazy or anything, but her and her, like, five buddies did, like, paint their hair a really fake-looking, like, purple color.”
What’s going on here? Has your daughter suddenly turned into an air-headed Valley Girl? Not at all, according to Temple University linguist and mom Dr. Muffy Seigel.
Siegel – and if you’re wondering why a respected college professor publishes her research in Oxford University’s Journal of Semantics under the name “Muffy,” consider that she is also an accomplished ventriloquist who has been known to bring her puppet Gregory Grackle to college functions with her – became interested in the purpose of “like” when her older daughter Miriam, then 13, brought the word home.
Enlisting her daughter in her study, Siegel had Miriam tape interviews with 23 of her fellow honors students at her suburban Philadelphia high school. More than half of this elite group used the word, proving that it isn’t an indication of declining IQ.
Siegel believes “like” holds a unique place in English grammar. It’s not just an empty filler like “um” and “well.” It indicates uncertainty, but not in a way that the listener could disagree with.
“There is no other word that has all the functions of like,” Siegel said. “It has a very specific meaning. There’s no other way to say this.”
Technically, linguists would say that “the adolescent hedge ‘like’ is a discourse particle signaling a possible slight mismatch between words and meaning.”
Or, as Miriam defined it for her mother at age 13:
like no part of speech: what I'm about to say is the best way I can come up with to word what I want to say, but I'm not really sure it's exactly right.
Unlike “about” or “approximately,” Siegel said “like” makes it impossible to contradict the speaker. If someone tells you, “He has, like, six brothers,” and you reply, “No, he has EXACTLY six brothers,” your informant is probably going to respond, “That’s what I said! He has, like, six brothers.”
While “like” doesn’t have any equivalents in our language, other tongues, including ancient Hittite (one of the languages of the Old Testament) and Sanskrit, do have words that fill this same purpose. And, however unlikely it sounds, Siegel said when translators come across them, they use “like” to indicate them.
Of course, “like” has another function in the English language all its own: that of making grammar-conscious grownups nuts. Numerous newspaper stories attest to the older generation’s aversion to the word.
“The current crop of near-adults has invented a burp of language so annoying, so pointless, so inarticulate, that I pledged to clobber it out of existence,” wrote Columnist Bob Levey of the Washington Post.
In a story about a new course in oral communication designed to wipe out what she deemed “mallspeak,” Smith College President Ruth Simmons told the Boston Globe, "It's minimalist, it's reductionist, it's repetitive, it's imprecise, it's inarticulate, it's vernacular,” and added, “It drives me crazy.”
The fact that Siegel is appearing to “defend” the use of “like” has earned her somewhat esoteric study a lot of attention from the media as well.
Saratoga Parent editor, Denise Bassett, jumped on Seigel’s findings when she heard the linguist interviewed on public radio, and not just because she thought it would make a good story. The “shorthand” conversation favored by her Bassett’s two oldest kids, Heidi, 15, and Robert, 14, when they get home from school always struck her as “verbal laziness.”
“Sometimes Heidi and Robert will be spilling over with information and I’ll hear 50 ‘likes’ in the space of a minute,” she said.
Heidi Bassett agreed that using “like” in front of her parents often elicits a comment.
“They’ll make fun of me and mock me,” she said. “It’s like a teasing thing.” (Robert claimed to never use the word, despite evidence to the contrary, as well as to spending all his time in his room and thus never having to talk in front of his parents.)
Siegel has a simple explanation for why teens’ use of “like” bothers grownups so much.
“It annoys us because it’s meant to,” she said. “It’s a badge of youthful belonging. They’re doing it to bond.”
Anecdotally, “like” appears in the speech of kids as young as 8 and can continue on into a person’s thirties. Although after its emergence among “certain young female California speakers” 15 to 20 years ago scholars expected it to disappear again rather quickly, Siegel wrote, “the Valley Girl ‘like’ remains widespread and very robust.”
(Even older people find it can be catching. While working on this article, I heard myself complaining to some friends, “I’ve got, like, five stories to write this week!”)
Siegel believes much of the animosity to “like” isn’t necessarily about language as much as it’s about who’s talking.
“People don’t like speech patterns when they belong to people we don’t like, such as ‘air-headed Valley Girls,’” she noted. But slapping “like” users with that label can be misleading, she said. The students who used “like” in her study “were all really bright kids.”
Teens themselves can be surprisingly insightful when asked about why they and their friends slip so many “likes” into their conversations.
“If they don’t, like, if they’re kind of forgetting what they’re saying, they use it to kind of, like, stall,” explained 12-year-old Emily Shovan of Glens Falls.
High schooler Robert Bassett has noticed that girls use “like” a lot when they’re talking to each other (or to him). And he’s noticed that girls will use the word to hedge their bets, even when they shouldn’t need to.
“In science class, when girls are, like, talking,” he’s observed, girls will use the word, “if they think that they’re right, but they’re not sure but have a good idea.”
Interestingly, kids can control when and where the “likes” pour out. Just as with curse words – NOT that your children would ever use THAT kind of language, of course – Siegel said kids can usually switch back and forth between a “formal” and “informal” register.
That’s what tenth-grader Heidi Bassett has found.
“With a teacher, I really think about what I’m going to say, but with my peers, I’m not self-conscious. All my friends do it,” she said.
Ultimately, trying to get kids to stop using “like” altogether can be a losing battle.
“As a linguist, I know you can’t legislate use,” Siegel said.
What parents can do is help their children understand that, “There’s nothing wrong with it in the right context, but not when you’re being interviewed for college or a job.”
If a kid is having trouble putting the brakes on “like,” he needs to stop and think before he speaks.
“Good advice is to wait a beat and think about what you’re about to say,” Siegel said. “Then you won’t be searching for words.”
Having heard the verdict from the language expert, Saratoga Parent’s Bassett said she’s embarrassed now that she picked on her kids’ grammar.
“I’m much more tolerant of it now,” she said. “I guess they’ll grow out of it.”
© 2002 Kathy Ceceri
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