A new book argues the long despised word associated with valley girls is now essential to the way we communicate
I
f you’re a millennial or millennial-adjacent, you probably grew up being chastised for using the word “like” inappropriately. You’re probably familiar with the sins: the first is employing it as a filler word, to give you time to think: “I was, like, trying to speak in a socially acceptable way.” The second is using it to mean “said”, as in: “My English teacher was like, ‘Don’t talk like that.’” And the third is using it to denote approximation: “People who police the word are all, like, a million years old.”
Yet, we all made it to adulthood despite the verbal carnage; many of us even have jobs that require communication. Now that millennials are, like, becoming the establishment, will the stigma against the word disappear?
Megan C Reynolds, a millennial and author of Like: A History of the World’s Most Hated (And Misunderstood) Word, says part of what older generations rejected about “like” – as with so much language – was its relative newness during our childhoods, which “probably made them feel old”. The controversial use of the word came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, though it has been evolving since the year 1200, according to the linguist Alexandra D’Arcy. Today it is a firm part of the English lexicon, stretching from its inescapability on Love Island, to its role as the title of an Ice Spice EP (Like..?), to its regular employment by NPR’s “erudite, measured” interviewer Terry Gross, who has been praised for using “like” as “stepping stones within sentences, on which she presses her weight, pivots, and tucks into her point”.
