The Tyranny of “Like” -- Teaching Language and Clarity

By Colman McCarthy

Much of my time is spent with high school and college students. Enjoyable time, of course. But not totally. It’s when they talk. As in, it’s when they, like, talk. Or tell you that it’s, like, awesome. Or that they are late to class because, like, it was raining.

It’s a rare sentence that goes likeless, as if like were a crutch on which language hobbles along only a slow step ahead of babble talk.

I’ve had students sprinkle in more than 30 likes in only a couple of sentences. The likes pour out so profusely that I did the counting by twos. Threes might have been easier. I thought of calling the school electrician to wire each seat. Every time I’d hear a like, I’d press a clicker that would send a volt or two into the speaker. Shock ‘em into coherency.

As supercarriers of this linguistic virus, the young appear to be affecting the whole population. A recent New Yorker cartoon showed a psychiatrist sitting behind the office couch and telling his reclining patient, “Can we start all over? Like, from 1987, say?”

Elle magazine quoted the teen starlet Hilary Duff rhapsodizing about her boyfriend: ”He doesn’t socialize. He’s very real, like, he’s from a pretty ghetto place in Maryland.”

The Washington Post quoted a lovestruck romeo on how the evening went with his date: “I wanted to call her, like, an hour after I left.”

Here’s Roseann Barr, an alleged comedian, displaying her oral tic: “I could totally win [against President Bush] in a mind contest. Like, if it was, like, a psychic thing and he was, like, okay Roseanne, bring your best powers against my best powers, even though he’s like, totally worldwide connected, and I’m not so worldwide, I could so totally still win on account of, like, being female, being a grandmother and, like, you know, being intelligent, I could totally win.”

None of this ghastliness, Barr none, has gone unnoticed by defenders of correct speech. Among those on the case is James Wallace, a cognitive linguist and founder/editor of the Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature (SPELL, Box 321, Braselton, GA, 30517). In a recent issue of his newsletter, Spell Binder, the lead essay, “Like, Where Is Our Language Going, “ cites linguist Richard Lederer on the promiscuous use of like: “To most of us, like is a preposition that means that something is similar to something else but is not the idea or thing itself. Thus, dusting statements with a world of approximation seems to me to encourage half thoughts. I fret that the permeating influence of like makes imprecision the norm and keeps both speakers and listeners from coming to grips with the thoughts behind the words.”

I’d advise my fellow teachers to practice caution when attempting to reform, rebuke or refine serial likers. I’ve tried, only to be put on notice that with all my uhs, ums and ers, plus my hemming and hawing, I wasn’t exactly Demosthenes in the agora.

They had a point. I’ve been umming with the best, or worst, of them. Uhing, too. These pauses and fillers are the hamburger helpers in our speech patterns, bulking up our sentences with what we hope will be taken as intellectual protein.

How bleak is it? A new book offers a clue. In “Um….Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean,” Michael Erard reports that we tote as many as 22 of these mislocutions a day. More than 150 a week. Nearly 2,000 a year.

So I’m going to rehab. As with athletes who say they are playing one game at a time, against five or ten at a time, I’m hitting my brain’s delete key one um and er a time. And if that doesn’t do it, there’s that school electrician.