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!”
[QUOTE=Flander]
Imagine replacing the stereotypical airline captain’s “uuuh” with “liiike”. I’m cracking up thinking about it! You have to use the same voice though, no valley girl…
“Liiike this is your captain speaking. We have liiiike been approved for take off. We’ll be cruising at approximately liiiiike 35,000 feet. I’ve activated the liiiike fasten seatbelt sign as we will be experiencing some strong headwinds…liiiiike giggidy.”
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=norinew]
Ha! I wish my teenager would say “like”. Instead, when she needs to plan out her next word mentally, she hums, very briefly and quietly. She’ll be explaining something to me about her photography class, for example, and say something like:
So Professor F said that the convex lens ishmmused in circumstanceshmmmwhen the concave ishmmmmnot appropriate.
I don’t think she even knows she does it. She’s normally very bright, articulate, etc. But after the fifteenth hmmm in the space of ten minutes, I get all stabby.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=Sapo]
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.
[/QUOTE]
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.
(YouTube clip of Armstrong & Miller, a current BBC sketch show)
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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!
[QUOTE=Freddy the Pig]
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.
[/QUOTE]
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."
[QUOTE=Sunspace]
Is that paper available on an open site, no subscription required?
[/QUOTE]
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:
[QUOTE=Arnold Zwicky]
In any case, teenagers have been fond of discourse-particle uses of “like” for quite some time, at least 50 years; some people now in their 50s and 60s still use “like” this way. Meanwhile, quotative “like” has risen in 25 or 30 years to become the dominant quotative in the speech of young people (and some older speakers use it too). The result is that some young people are indeed heavy users of “like” in functions that some of their elders do not use it in. And many of these older speakers are annoyed as hell about that.
This strongly negative response deserves some attention and analysis. Here I’m just going to open up the issues a bit.
When people complain to me about discourse-particle and quotative “like”, I ask them why they dislike it so, and they usually say that kids are just sprinkling a meaningless word (discourse-particle “like”) all over their sentences and are inexplicably choosing to use a preposition (quotative “(be) like”) instead of the perfectly good verb “say”. They characterize these uses as “bad habits”; they are very resistant to the idea that people who use “like” as a discourse particle or quotative are actually DOING THINGS by their linguistic choices (though the functions of these choices are what linguists have mostly been interested in); and they are offended by teenagers’ rejection of older standard usages in favor of innovations. That is, they make no attempt to figure out what people who use a somewhat different variety from their own are conveying (they are uncooperative in their interpretation of other people’s speech), and they refuse permission to other people to have varieties of their own (they demand conformity).
Uncooperativeness and demands for conformity attend responses to other inter-group linguistic differences, of course, especially when the groups differ socially, in power or prestige. I have met people who simply REFUSE to understand “double negation” (“I didn’t see no dogs” ‘I didn’t see any dogs’) in non-standard varieties, for example. But young people seem to suffer especially from these responses. No doubt that’s because they are, after all, OUR children (for some sense of “our”) and we are distressed that they refuse to be just like us.
Note that discourse-particle and quotative “like” have both linguistic value (they can be used to convey nuances of meaning) and social value (they’re part of the way personas and social-group memberships are projected). I’m not denying that there are fashions in these things; a major part of the Stanford ALL Project’s recent work, in fact, has treated changes over time (some of them huge) in the details of the way people use “all” and its competitors. When I talk to those who object so strongly to “innovative” uses of “like”, I try to hit both the linguistic and the social points: the kids are doing things with these usages, and they’re also following fashion (and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that, especially if you’re 15). And: nobody is saying that YOU should be talking that way.
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…”.
[QUOTE=CookingWithGas]
:rolleyes: Once I had a waitress in her 20’s who, every time one of us gave her an order, said, “Awesome!” [insert your own rant here]
[/QUOTE]
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?”
[QUOTE=Ignatz]
OK, that’s all like well and good but where did the use of “I’m like…” and “I was like…” to mean “I said…” and “I thought…” come from?
[/QUOTE]
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.
