I think it’s helpful to distinguish between two very different ways in which “like” is used–as a noise word (as in the OP, and in the book Exapno describes), and as a synonym for “said”, as in post#7.
The former usage is annoying, as any mindlessly repeated noise word is annoying. The latter usage at least has value, as it indicates paraphrase, which we would indicate in writing by a lack of quote marks. There is no readily available substitute.
However, the latter usage can also be annoying when delivered in breathless teen-speak: “And then I was like, totally, and she was like, no way, and I was like, well we’ll see then!”
My wife and i will start counting the “likes” out loud when my teenage daughter and her friends get together. It’s funny. They get totally flabbergasted.
I went to speech therapy for this. It only took me a handful of sessions. Just hearing myself taped doing this was enough to make me realize how incredibly annoying this was to everybody else. Suggest ST to her. She will thank you.
That’s not a bad idea. It’s not that I’m afraid I’ll kill her before she reaches adulthood (hell, if I was gonna kill one of my kids, my oldest would have been dead years ago!) it’s that the whole habit makes her sound less. . .intelligent. And that’s going to hurt her once she gets out in the real world.
The firewall here at work prevents me from going to Youtube (rightfully so), so I’ll have to be patient and check it out when I get home tonight. Can’t wait!
This is the distinction between the discourse particle “like”, which is what the OP’s examples were all of, and quotative “like”, as noted in post #7. But like I said, the discourse particle is not a meaningless “noise word”; its semantic contribution is subtle, but certainly non-null (it’d be rather hard to write all those papers on its semantics otherwise). A rough starting point for a formulation of its meaning is given in Lawrence Schourup’s 1985 “Common Discourse Particles”, quoted in the above Siegel paper: " ‘like’ is used to express a possible unspecified minor nonequivalence of what is said and what is meant."
I haven’t been able find it on any such site, alas (the very idea of academic journals being closed off from the public in this way is one of those issues which really annoys me). Perhaps, if you are interested enough, you could gain access through a local university library’s computers.
For those who find discourse particle “like” so grating, I think the following remarks from Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky (from Language Log again) are insightful:
I’ve started the process of training Kizarvexilla (who is about to turn 9, Og help me) to refrain from using “like” as a filler. As has already been mentioned, pointing it out to the offender is the first step in curbing this behavior. A recent example:
She: Daddy, I’m, like, TALKING here!
Me: So, my daughter, you are not actually talking, but just pretending to talk. Is that what you’re telling me?
She: Huh?
Me: You said you were “like, talking”. Which would imply that you are doing something that is similar to the act of speaking, but doesn’t quite match the definition.
She: Daddy, you are so weird.
Me: Thank you. I’ve worked hard to become so.
For the next hour or two following just such an exchange, Kizarvexilla will monitor her speech for any untoward use of the offending construction, and even apologize each time one slips through.
Or how about the filler “Ya know what im sayin” that I heard during sports interviews?
Or the way teens talk about a coversation they already had with someone. Instead of saying “And then she said…”, “And then I said…” they go with
“And then I was all…”, “And then she was all…”.
A couple of weeks ago, while in a silly sort of mood, I used “awesome” when I obtained the correct solution to a physics (or was it algebra?) question I had been working on. The way I said it made my husband laugh, so as a joke, I kept saying it, every time I accomplished anything at all (even the most trivial steps in a problem).
A few days later, while working on an assignment with some classmates, I did the same thing! “Awesome!” Everyone laughed, a few people said they hadn’t heard that in a while, and that’s when I realised that I had begun using it fairly often! All because of a joke! It’s amazing how quickly you can add a “meaningless” word into your vocabulary.
I have been making a conscious effort to stop saying “awesome!” ever since, and I think I have mostly cured myself of this little affectation! I’d venture that most people who use words such as “like” and “all” in every sentence don’t even realise they are doing it. Like the Canadian “eh?”
Those are the ‘quotative like’ I mentioned earlier. They introduce a description, possibly acted out, of the state of the speaker when he or she was saying and thinking.
