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The other like that women tend to use more frequently is categorized as a discourse marker and can be found in contexts such as, “Like, this suit isn’t even new.” A discourse marker - sometimes called a filler word - is a type of phrase that can help a person connect, organize or express a certain attitude with their speech. This very useful quotative like continues to explode in common usage. For example, in the sentence “My boss was like, ‘I need those papers by Monday,’ and I was like, ‘Are you f-ing kidding me?’” you’re not repeating what you truly said but instead using like to convey what you wanted to say or how you felt in the interaction.
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That one would be the quotative like, which you hear in, “I was like, ‘I want to see Superwoman.’” As lampooned as it is, pragmatically speaking, this like is one of my favorites because it allows you to tell a story, to relay something that happened, without having to quote the interaction verbatim. Only two of these likes are used more frequently by women, and only one of them is thought to have been masterminded by young Southern California females in the 1990s. The two converged at some point over the last 800 or so years, giving us lots of time to get used to them.īut four new likes developed much more recently than that - and D’Arcy says these are all separate words with distinct uses, as well. The Oxford English Dictionary says that the verb like comes from the Old English term lician, and the adjective comes from the Old English līch. They’re homonyms, just how the noun watch (meaning the timepiece on your wrist) and the verb watch (meaning what you do with your eyes when you turn on the TV) are homonyms. Today, these two likes sound exactly the same, so most people don’t even notice that they’re different words with separate histories. In the sentence, “I like your suit, it makes you look like James Bond,” the first like is a verb and the second is an adjective - and even the crabbiest English speakers are fine with both. The two oldest types in English are the adjective like and the verb like.
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“We can find speakers today in their 70s, 80s and 90s around little villages in the United Kingdom, for example,” D’Arcy says with a smile, “who use like in many of the same ways that young girls today are using it.”Īccording to D’Arcy, there are six completely distinct forms of the word like. But the truth is that like has been a part of English for more than 200 years. D’Arcy ebulliently describes her work for the university’s YouTube channel: “Like is a little word that we really, really don’t like at all - and we want to blame young girls, who we think are destroying the language,” she explains. Alexandra D’Arcy, Canadian linguist at the University of Victoria, has dedicated much of her research to identifying and understanding the many functions of like. And women are not the only people who use them.ĭespite the word’s detractors, like is in fact extremely useful and versatile. Vocal fry, uptalk and even like, are in fact not signs of ditziness, but instead all have a unique history and special social utility. One of these scholars is Carmen Fought, a linguist from Pitzer College, who says, “If women do something like uptalk or vocal fry, it’s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional or even stupid.” But the truth is much more interesting: Young women use the linguistic features that they do, not as mindless affectations, but as power tools for establishing and strengthening relationships. Fortunately, there are plenty of language experts who’ve taken “Valley girl” speak seriously enough to figure out what it actually is.