Megan Reynolds is an editor at Dwell magazine and previously worked at Jezebel and The Billfold. She has written for Buzzfeed, the New York Times, Elle, Gawker, Bustle, Vulture, and other outlets. She was also the co-host of the celebrity gossip podcast Dirtcast.
What’s the big idea?
If you’ve spent your life being told to stop saying “like”—or are someone who’s been doing the telling—then it’s time to flip the script. What if “like” is worth keeping in our sentences? Turns out, this controversial little word might actually be, like, super handy.
Below, Megan shares five key insights from her new book, Like: A History of the World’s Most Hated (and Misunderstood) Word. Listen to the audio version—read by Megan herself—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Everybody says “like.”
Thanks to the twin scourges of sexism and misogyny, the word “like” is largely associated with women and therefore vilified. It’s true that Valley girls and their way of speaking brought the use of “like” to the public. But “like” has been around in many of the ways we use it today for a long time, appearing in court records from the UK dating back to the 1600s.
Women—and often teenage girls—are at the forefront of linguistic innovation. We learn speech via our primary caregivers, and usually our primary caregivers are women, so it makes sense that these kinds of things proliferate. According to a 2009 study, most of the linguistic changes we undergo happen during adolescence, so teenage girls (who are often dismissed as silly, frivolous, or otherwise lesser) are forging ahead with the new ways of speech they’ve picked up from the internet, their parents, or each other and spreading that around. Men, generally slower to the uptake, pick up these ways of speaking, too!
2. Like shows that you care.
It might be strange to think about a filler word being anything other than fluff, but the versatility of “like” is often overlooked. When you cram a “like” into a sentence where all it’s doing is buying you time, that move is just as much for your benefit as it is for the person you’re talking to. If you say to a dear friend that like, you’re not, like, entirely sure about that interesting haircut decision, you’re softening the blow of your message. You are trying to be gentle enough to preserve the friendship and that friend’s delicate ego.
“The versatility of ‘like’ is often overlooked.”
Instead of buying yourself time with a spot of dead air—an um or uh—a “like” allows the conversation to keep moving, even if what you’re trying to say (and how you’re trying to say it) feels onerous or otherwise difficult. Reframing your tendency to say “like” as an act of caretaking, however small and imperceptible, is overall a better use of your time and energy.
3. Like allows you to be more expressive when telling a story.
When you tell a story about a bad, fun, or otherwise notable experience, chances are “like” is the engine that drives that conversation forward. The quotative use of “like” is the one that upsets people most, which is, in and of itself, upsetting because it is extraordinarily useful.
The tricky thing about speech is that when we’re telling a story or recounting an experience, if we want to directly quote someone, we must use “say” or “said.” This gets the job done, but it takes a sense of pizzazz, verve, or emotion away from the story. “My boss was like, ‘Could you maybe just do this better” and “My boss asked me if I was struggling in my role” evoke two very different sentiments.
It’s likely that the latter sentence is a true enough retelling of what happened, but the former sentence is probably closer to the emotional truth. The one with “like” allows you to portray how you felt, which is arguably more important than exactly what happened in the first place.
4. Like has nothing to do with professionalism.
The notion of professionalism feels antiquated, especially since the pandemic changed the very notion of what an office even is, and whether it’s worth having at all. Because of this shift, the nature of work changed. Since work is happening in the same place where you eat, sleep, and breathe, the rules for what is or isn’t professional naturally shift.
“Policing ourselves in the workplace from fear of someone’s outdated notion about what sounds right is time wasted.”
We now know proper Zoom etiquette and most of us have figured out what we need at home to get our jobs done. While we may have sorted out how to act, there are still unwritten or silent rules around how we speak in the workplace, but there’s nothing unprofessional about speaking casually, even if that means saying “like” every other word. Policing ourselves in the workplace from fear of someone’s outdated notion about what sounds right is time wasted that could be spent doing anything else.
Being professional doesn’t mean cutting filler words out of your speech entirely; it just means knowing when to use them and where. Like with everything in life, context matters. If it’s, like, not a big deal to get your coworker that thing they asked for later this afternoon, then don’t beat yourself up for it.
5. Like allows for nuance.
Detractors of “like” and other filler words often say that this kind of verbal clutter distracts from the main point of any given conversation, and that a conversation littered with fillers is imprecise and lacks clarity. This can seem true in the moment, especially in a conversation where emotions are high and tempers are short, but if you pay attention to where the filler words fall, you’ll see that they are doing a service.
If “like” shows up in front of a phrase or a word in a conversation about a difficult topic, then that word is signposting to your conversation partner that what you’re about to say after it is important. Filler words aren’t an indication of imprecision at all. Rather, they’re a useful way to communicate with nuance, which is arguably harder to come by in interpersonal relationships and can be much more meaningful.
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