I am not a native English speaker myself but I am very annoyed by the fact that a lot of people these days, native and also non-native English speakers, are continuously using the expression “it’s like” or just “like” in oral speech as a sort of link between ideas, phrases or just words. Transcribing a recording I get these kinds of formulas:
“And then I kind of like communicated this to him.”
“I like went up to like really submitting my paper.”
“And I hated it so I was like “no way I am doing that!””
“I have to kind of like succeed by myself, which is very hard.”
“When you do not know someone that is like very experienced…”
“What’s the purpose? Like, damaging the image of his colleagues…”
Is this a common feature of contemporary English?
What is the origin of this expression? How recent is this type of use?
Is it equally common in all dialects of English?
Answer
You are mistaken in supposing this to be a recent innovation: to the best of my recollection it arose in the late 1950s. At that time it was supposed to be characteristic of the ‘beat’ community, but it entered youthspeak almost immediately and has been current among the young ever since, at least in the United States (I cannot speak to other dialects). As teenagers grow older and are called upon to address more diverse audiences more formally, they generally learn alternative expressions (as it were, so to speak, I think, in my opinion) culled from severer registers; but like never entirely disappears from speech with close friends.
It has a useful and indeed essential function in speech as a discourse marker. When it first arose it was employed primarily as an anticipatory emphatic, to signal that what follows will be of particular importance—Maynard G. Krebs’ favorite expression was “Like, wow!”—but by the end of the 60s it had acquired additional anticipatory uses: notably 1) as a signal that a subsequent pause will not mark the end of an utterance but further processing and 2) as a lexical ‘quotation mark’.
There is thus nothing to deprecate in the usage except snobbish preference for more prestigious markers. If the usage annoys you, I suggest you seek a more pretentious class of interlocutors.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : cipricus , Answer Author : StoneyB on hiatus
