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By John McWhorter
Opinion Writer
Some months ago, one of my readers sent me an invaluable cache of recordings of family members during therapy sessions in the 1960s. They are ordinary, seemingly educated, white Northeasterners ranging from their late 20s to late middle age speaking casually. And what stands out today, 60 years later, is how often they pause briefly when they talk. Their speech sounds almost herky-jerky to the modern ear.
The reason their speech sounds somewhat odd in that way is that today people like those on the recording would fill those many of those pauses with “like.”
It’s not, as sometimes assumed, that people used to talk formally, or “like books,” any more than they do now. Casual speech, always and everywhere in any language, is all about short sentences, often unfinished, often with occasional hesitations. But only in the late 1970s did “like” take its confident perch in American English.
The question is why. The answer is not the Frank Zappa’s cute 1982 ditty “Valley Girl” featuring his teenage daughter, Moon. For one thing, a single song doesn’t change the way people talk every day. For another, that song only leads to the question of why Moon was using “like” that way, given that it wasn’t just her personal quirk — she was part of what we now call a “thing.”
Some people think this usage of “like” reflects some kind of epidemic of uncertainty among young people. But the casual “like” has now been entrenched long enough that many of its users are graying at the temples and then some. How unconfident are these near-sexagenarians?
The modern “like” is actually a symptom of something more general about how languages change over time. Language, like nature, abhors a vacuum. All languages have a tendency to seep into corners of meaning and get explicit about them, instead of simply leaving them to context. Language likes to get picky.
The subjunctive in Romance languages is picky about the hypothetical, for instance. “She arrives” in Spanish is “Ella llega,” but to say “I hope she arrives,” you have to change the ending and say “Espero que ella llegue.” English largely leaves that nuance of uncertainty to context; Spanish wants it spelled out.
A still more extravagant example: In the Kwaio language of the Solomon Islands, the word for “we” is different depending on whether you mean yourself and the person you’re talking to or yourself and someone else. There are also different words for “we” if you are talking about yourself and three people including whom you are talking to, or three people not including whom you are talking to, or more than three people. Kwaio can leave an English speaker with we-ness envy.
English has its hang-ups of this kind too. One is how to express the future, which is much more complex than just using “will.” “I will buy you some socks” is, if you think about it, a rather odd thing to say. It sounds a bit like something you concede reluctantly after having resisted: “OK … I will buy you some socks.” More typically we choose from several other options. “I’m going to buy you some socks” is the more likely “vanilla” version of the sentence. “I’ll buy you some socks,” with the contraction, sounds like you are solving a problem. “Tomorrow I buy you some socks” sounds festive, like an initiation rite or a quinceañera. By contrast, “Tomorrow I’m buying you some socks” sounds a little like a threat.
English is also oddly explicit about, of all things, restraint. We speak with a tacit impulse to keep the drama level moderate, to avoid stridency. One way of doing this is to use the hesitations I referred to in that 1960s recording: You pause before saying something that raises the temperature a bit, reflects an opinion that might arouse, pushes the envelope. But one might also spell out the hesitation more overtly, and this where the casual “like” comes in. It quietly implies that what’s coming up is “like” itself rather than just itself, which lowers the temperature, keeps the burner on medium rather than high.
“Like”— as well as “sort of,” which has become a “like” for more formal settings, with “kind of” often filling in as a variant of both — is a subtle thing. To learn to use it idiomatically as a foreigner is as tricky as learning how those variations of the English future tense really work. There is even a masterful academic book on the subject. But most of the ways the casual “like” is used are ultimately variations on that quest for lowering the temperature. Here, for example, is a word-for-word transcription of an American undergraduate speaking casually in the 2020s, recorded for non-linguistic purposes. In writing, it looks shaggy, but in real life, the person sounded perfectly fluent and even intelligent:
In terms of like, figuring out how to do that exactly, like what to like, um, look for specifically, especially because like, they’re, you know, like, in the workplace setting like, your job is to follow the guidelines so, like, you know, kind of figuring out how to learn like what, how the conflicts are playing out ….
The “likes” in that quote don’t occur just anywhere, but before something new, something with a bit of impact: the task of figuring something out, the issue that this is a workplace setting rather than your house, the challenge of following new rules, the drama of conflicts. One could certainly express all of this without the use of “like” and “you know” and “kind of,” but the result would be a little crisp for casual conversation, perhaps a tad Boy Scout or Leslie Knope-ish.
The temptation is strong to link the emergence of “like” to something about being American sometime around the Carter administration. We might propose that we are more polite than in the old days, keeping it mellow with “like” instead of just laying it out directly. But why would that be? The 1970s, after all, were supposedly about the “Me Generation,” which presumably would have encouraged a certain boldness in speech. And anything else we might tie it to — more weed after the 1960s? — would have to explain both why it held on long past that era and why it happened in other Anglophone lands with cultures different from ours.
Instead, the casual “like” is probably just a tic that happened to catch on, unconnected to anything personal or cultural, like the Romance subjunctive, the Kwaio pronouns or the future in our own language. After all, French speakers are not professionally hypothetical. Kwaio speakers have no reason to obsess over precisely who is included in a reference to “we.” English speakers have no spiritual need for a way of referring to the future with a hint of menace.
In other words, the casual “like” is just business as usual with the evolution of language — and that evolution often confounds. Back in the 1990s, for example, I asked a man close to 100 years old whether there was anything he’d noticed about the way young people talked back in the 1920s. His answer: “People said ‘you know’ too much!”
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter
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