I walk across the campus and overhear:  “This class is, like, hard.  I mean, like, I’m so confused.  That professor is, like, he doesn’t make sense.”  I stroll by two smokers at the back door to the office and catch a bit of conversation:  “It’s, like, complicated.  We’re, like, living together, but we’re not, like, engaged or anything.”

What is going on here?  When did the word like become ubiquitous?  What does it (like) mean in the above contexts? These are not idle questions, for it is apparent that we are witnessing a major step in the evolution of language (whether this evolution is forward or backward is another question).  As with many American trends, the like phenomenon appears to have started in California, where people are exposed to excessive doses of direct sunlight and Hollywood.  But like has crossed the continent faster than a 747.  While on vacation in Maine, I overheard a young lady in Bar Harbor expounding enthusiastically about something or other in a series of phrases all introduced by like.  I have no idea what the topic of conversation was, for the likes got in the way of any coherent thoughts.

Incidentally, is it sexist to conclude that the addiction to like is largely a female phenomenon.  I don’t believe that I hear as many guys using it.  But young women – especially teens when they are hyper (which is roughly all the time) – seem to fling likes about with the persistence of a dog scratching a flea in its ear.

What part of speech is like when it is so used?  Where it has any function at all (which it often does not), like appears to be some sort of modifier.  However, I’m a bit confused about whether, for example, something that is “like hard” is less than completely hard, extremely hard, or just plain hard.  In the last instance, of course, like becomes redundant, which is what I suspect it to be – most of the time.

Though I haven’t heard it yet, I fully expect to hear some young lady say that she’s “like pregnant,” thus giving a perfect example of a usage that has to be more than, like, a little redundant.

Another possibility is that like is an example of a grammatical construction so obscure that grammar books ignore it – the nonce stop.  Other examples of nonce stops are “uh” and, more recently, “y’know.”  These are used by people to run sentences together so that they can talk nonstop.

The term nonce stop, however, derives from nonce, meaning “now” or “immediately,” and stop.  It was coined by someone who observed that, when we hear people say “y’know” fifty times in five minutes, we wish they would stop immediately.  After the tenth “y’know,” one wants to shake the speaker and scream, “No, I don’t know – or, if I did, why are you wasting my time telling me?”

The charitable way of viewing like and y’know is to conclude that the speaker is nervous.  This would certainly apply when someone unaccustomed to public speaking has to address a group.  However, such insertions of meaningless words often occur in the most casual conversations where no cause for nervousness exists.

In all probability, people who repeatedly use like and y’know are not only habituated to using these words but are also accustomed to opening their mouths without engaging their brains.  At the very least, they feel uncomfortable with even a split second’s pause in a conversation, especially in their own, usually one-sided conversation.  In reality, the calculated pause enhances conversation, but talk punctuated by repeated vacuities eventually sounds altogether vacuous.

And that, y’know, is, like, about all I have to say on this subject, so I’ll, like, quit here.

Rich Turner