LIKE

Andrew Sullivan points us to a study of the use of "like" and then offers one explanation for why so many women like-ify their speech, courtesy of Erin Gloria Ryan:

Saying "I'm an aerospace engineer," or "I enjoy reading Don DeLillo" sounds much more intimidating than "I'm, like, an engineer," or "I enjoy reading, like, Don DeLillo." Maybe women of my generation have been taught, through positive social reinforcement, that we're supposed to pepper our speech with meaningless modifiers that make us sounds a little less sure of ourselves, a little less credible. No one likes a show off or a know-it-all. Better temper your smart-talk with assurance to whoever you're speaking that you're not, like, a threat or anything.

No doubt. But if you look at the graph, the greatest part of the "like"s these days are not self-deprecating qualifiers ("I'm, like, an IRS agent") but rather quotative, as in, "I was like, 'I will kick your ass.'" And the explanation for the quotative "like," I think, is that people don't want to own their statements. "I was, like, 'I'll never take you back'" has a lot more wiggle room than "I told him, 'I will never take you back.'" The quotative "like" implies that you are approximating what you said, but hey, we shouldn't hold you to the exact wording. The old-fashioned quotative "I said" commits you to a more precise recollection.

And I think this has been a big change in our mental landscape. When I think about my grandmother, who used precise language, when she quoted herself, she meant what she said (and often had said something pretty strong). "I told him not to call before 10 am" was much more severe than what I (alas) might say, which is "I was like, 'Don't call before 10.'" And she had to be a lot more certain of what she had said to recall herself saying it—because that was going out on a limb, claiming to recall those precise words. With "like" we get to fudge, to be euphemistic, to give ourselves an out if somebody catches us on film. George Allen was not, like, "macaca"—he called somebody "macaca."
 

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