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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!”
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