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Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

You. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. And there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too. And this is stuff you should know. Another linguistic fantastic gigantic edition.

Divisive, I guess.

Really, though, I mean, if you're standing up against the use or overuse of the word, like, just take your head out of the hole and look around and see other things that are really worth your time and effort and attention and energy.

Yeah, we've gotten the random email here and there. And like you said, we're talking about the word like not as in like you said, although we're going to cover all the supposedly proper uses.

Yeah. Also, we're going to accidentally use like or unconsciously use it. And this is going to be a really confusing episode.

Yeah, because it's how people talk for the most part. And it's not just young girls, as we'll see. That's sort of a sexist thing to think and a misnomer. We all do it generally, unless you are one of those people who thinks that it debases the human language and speech and you have taken a real stand against know godspeed if that's the hill you want to die. But, like, it ain't mine.

No, some people get so into it they throw cow's blood on people on the street when they use the word like. So, Chuck, let's talk about the word like itself, because there is like plenty of oh my God, I just did it. There is plenty of good usage or accepted usage of it. That's not controversial at all, which makes sense because it's been with us for a really long time, apparently, like, goes all the way back to old English. That's some old English, right? Eight ball 800. There's a word called gelleicht, and I looked it up. It is leiched, even though you'd think it was liched. L-I-T-C-H. That's how it's pronounced, but it's spelled G-E-L-I-C. Gelaich. And basically, it meant with the body. Lych meant body. Really? It meant corpse. So that was the literal meaning of gellaicht.

So, practically speaking, gelaicht meant with the body of. And then eventually kind of similar to. And then over time, because language changes. Thank goodness we don't speak old English anymore. Gelicht. That's even hard to say on its own. That was shortened to just li c, which I guess would just be leich.

Yeah.

And by then, it had lost the connection to corpse and body and became the root of the word, like, as in similar to.

Yeah. Isn't that fascinating? It originally meant corpse, and it meant related to the corpse. Then it meant to with the body of or similar to. And then just similar. Boom, bam, bomb.

I love it. And for a long, long time, it was used in old English, like as a suffix, and then that carried over like, F-O-L-C-L-I-C would have been. I guess folkleisht sounds german, like folklike. In other words, folksy. But then Americans started using it like, josh looks angry like, or that person is saint like. And sometimes we still use it like that, but in general, we came up with l y to stick on the end of a word to make it an adverb. And so we got words like slowly and saintly instead of saint like and slow like.

Yeah. So Lee ly seems to have evolved into an abbreviation for like. It still means the same thing. We just say it differently. It's abbreviated. The verb to like means to be pleasing or sufficient. Right, sure. Originally, it operated in reverse. Dave helped us with this, by the way. Great job, Dave. But if you liked something, it wasn't expressed as you like it. It was that the thing you like likes you. There's an example from the two gentlemen of Verona Shakespeare play, where one character says to another, the music likes you not, which means you don't like the music. And then eventually, everybody was like, we sound insane talking like this. And made it the way that it should be, which is how we say it. Today, which would just be. You don't like the music.

Yeah. There was other weird usages back then that have all since sort of gone away. Things earlier, I guess up through the 17th century, you could say liker or likeus. Like could use almost or nearly as in like, that play was so boring, I liked to fell asleep. Like, I almost fell asleep.

I like that.

Yeah, that's a good one. And then I believe in about the mid 19th century, which was a pretty late on the scene usage, was feel like, I feel like going bowling. As in, I'm in the mood to go bowling.

I should have said that. Likes me, right?

The bowling likes you.

Yeah. So since this has been around for probably close to 1000 years, maybe more, old English is around for a while. Like has evolved, but as far as words go, it's really, really evolved, and it's still evolving before our very eyes. But over the years in modern English, some widely accepted, grammatically correct uses of like have come about only five. Don't even try to go beyond that.

Yeah, there are supposedly only five as a verb, obviously, meaning to enjoy. I don't think we have to explain that as a noun. Like, here is a list of my likes.

Right?

Yeah.

Okay, my turn. Similar to, which is kind of like, of the body. The original version of like, that's a preposition. So, like, you smell like a wet dog. Or here's an example in here that looks like your spatula.

What situation would that arise in a chef cooking competition?

I guess so. Where it was stolen by the evil chef.

Yeah.

And your spatula, Josh, like the wingman friend. Chef is like, that looks like your spatula. Yeah. Okay, we figured it out. I feel better now.

We figured it out. What else? Conjunction, replacing. Know, like my dad always said, don't bother me for advice. Oh, sorry, I was getting personal.

Like, Josh always said, never trust family.

Exactly. The famous quote.

Okay, so those are the ones. Oh, there's one more as a suffix, like, remember we said saintly or something like that? Like, still hangs around in some cases. Like, you wouldn't say, that guy's innocent approach to nature is very childly. It's childlike. Yeah, but isn't that interesting that they mean the exact same thing, but you could use one for in one instance but not in another. They're not just interchangeable. I love that.

Yeah. And childlike is not childish. Two different things there too.

Exactly. But there's no such thing as childly, I think is my larger point.

Sure.

That's pretty much the point of the entire podcast. Really?

Yeah. And my point is, childlike is wonderful and childish is awful.

True that.

We should do one on ish. That's a good one.

I looked it up. I wondered if that came from Lich or Leich, and it doesn't. It's an even older word, I think that means from the country of or the origin of. So you would be Georgia ish.

Yeah. And now people, even my own daughter the other day, asked her something and she went, ish.

Yeah. It'd be worth one for sure. Down the road.

Maybe a shorty. Okay, shortish. A short like episode.

Should we a shortly episode. Should we take a breakly?

Surely.

Okay, let's do that now.

Very interesting.

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I just got to say, this is getting pretty fun.

You knew it was gonna be.

Yeah, right? I didn't know. Sure. I didn't. I figured we'd be slinging. Slinging the slang. And that's where we come to now, actually. Good setup, me. The slang of like is where people. Some people tend to get upset. It's interesting. Dave here says most people believe that any use of, like, outside those acceptable ways is meaningless. I would say some people. I don't think most people believe that at all.

Right. I thought that was an OD word to use, too.

Yeah. Come on, Dave.

I can't tell you the last time I ran into anybody who really had an issue with it. We haven't gotten an email on it for a while, but every once in a while, someone will write in and you could tell they're just, like, bleeding from their eyeballs. They hate us so much because we use the word like. Yeah, and it's just like, I can't do anything for you, man. I'm not going to stop talking the way I talk for you.

Yeah, that's just the way it is.

Nothing, personally.

Yeah, of course. The slang that we're talking about, though, that people have a problem with, and these people are generally like, it's filler. It's not even a word. It's basically your. Or your. You're abusing it, you're overusing it. And some people even go so far as to say, like I mentioned earlier, you're destroying the english language.

Okay? So those people just, I guess, buckle up, because this is the part we're going into now. Because it turns out if you hang out with the hip linguists, they will tell you, man, like, really performs a lot of really important functions. Yeah, that's exactly what they would say to you.

Phds.

Exactly. Exact like.

So Dave wrote up a little script. Do you want to play guy number one or guy number two?

I would like to be guy two.

Okay. You know what's funny is this sounds like a conversation we would have.

It totally does.

Backstage at the mall. Yeah. All right, here we go. Guy number one. That's me.

Okay.

Hey, Josh, have you seen what they're charging for the new Jordans?

I know. They're like, a million dollars. Who can afford this stuff?

I think they're, like 250 at foot Locker, which is still crazy.

I get that they're cool and everything, but if I paid $250 for shoes, Yumi would be like, we're getting a divorce and seen.

So we're going to break this down. And I thought this was a pretty good way for Dave to go about this. So hats off to Dave, but we're going to break this down because every single use of the word, like in that dramatic scene that we just portrayed for everyone, I wonder why our tv show got canceled. They all have a use. They all have a function. And those functions even have names.

Yeah, it's true. And it's not like they made up these names for, like they said these terms, these different kinds of grammatical usage that make up a lot of slang, especially in american spoken English. That's very important. We're talking almost exclusively here about spoken English. Like fills some of those already established compartments.

All right, so what's first?

The first is the way that I think most people who deride, like, what they focus on the most, which is called technically a quotative complimentizer, which basically what you're saying, that it sets up an impression, a paraphrase of what another person had said, would said might like. When I said Yumi would be like, we're getting a divorce. I'm not expecting you to believe in that conversation that Yumi told me that she's going to divorce me if I spend $250 on some air Jordans. But you know that the sentiment is generally true, maybe if a little exaggerated. So what that, like, is doing right there is signaling to you in conversation. Hey, take what I'm saying with a grain of salt here. I'm fudging a little bit, but I'm still just trying to get a general point across.

Yeah. And also, Dave points out it can also be used to set up a mimic or, like an impression of the speaker. You didn't do it there because you're respectful of Yumi.

Right.

But another gentleman might know, my wife would be like, we're getting a divorce, or something like that. It is used a lot of times to set up or know. Let's say it was Sammy Davis Jr.

Okay.

Sammy would be like, hey, man, I'm going to file tomorrow for divorce.

That was lovely. That was lovelike.

So the next thing we can talk about is the approximate adverb usage in this scene. That is when it's used. And this is very common. This is when it's used to mean around pretty much more or less just about like when I said, I think they're like $250 at foot locker. That means there were two or 300 people there. There were like two or 300 people there. The bill was like $70 or something. That means you're rounding up, or you're approximating something.

Yeah. And again, in this sense, too, like, signals to the listener, like, hey, don't fully take what I'm saying as fact. I'm not trying to be 100% accurate here. I'm trying to get a general idea across that this is really expensive. I saw a paper in the journal autism and developmental language impairments by Jones, Zayn, and Grossman, 2022, red hot. Still off the presses. And they use this example of somebody saying, like, I have, like, 100 pair of shoes. Right? You could have 40 pairs of shoes. And because you use the word like that, still gets the point across. And you're speaking. You're communicating in essentially an accurate way. What you're saying is, I have a lot of shoes now. It's actually 60 less than the number I just threw up. But it doesn't matter because 40 is still a pretty big number.

Right.

What, like, is doing here is standing in for approximately. And in this case, approximately wouldn't work, because if you said, I have approximately 100 shoes and you actually have 40, that number is so way off that you're essentially either lying or totally incorrect. Like, scuttles all that and says, hey, just go with me here a little bit. I'm just saying I have a bunch of shoes.

Yeah, it really covers your bases.

That's a legitimate function of conversation.

No, absolutely. I do want to poke Dave here just once, because one example he used was the movie starts at, like, two or three. Well, that's a case, Dave. You should be pretty specific.

Dave's always late. We just always late for movies.

All right, what's next? We have the discourse marker, right?

Yeah, this is pretty important, too, right?

So this is probably something that you didn't know that it was called this, but we all use discourse markers all the time. He found another linguist named Anne Kurzan, who has this analogy where a discourse marker is like a traffic signal or road sign that helps you navigate spoken English. And, like, is very versatile in this function because it can mean a bunch of different things as a discourse marker. The first of which, like you said, could be exaggeration in this case of our scene. I know these Jordans are like a million dollars. It's obviously not a million dollars, but it sets it up as. I'm clearly exaggerating.

Yeah, it's similar to the pair of shoes thing, too, where if I said, I know they're a million dollars, you'd be like, no, they're not. That's a little high.

I am from Russia.

In mother Russia, Air Jordan's by you. In Russia, music likes you not.

It can be used as a discourse marker for emphasis. In our scene. Have you seen what they're charging for these new air Jordans? So like just sort of emphasizes scene and it just sort of pumps up that like, hey, it's, something outrageous is about to come your way.

Yeah. Another one is, let me elaborate. So when I think I said who can afford this stuff? I'm actually elaborating on a previous sentence about how expensive they are. So they're really expensive. Let me elaborate. Who out there could afford this stuff? That's how expensive they are. Just adding like right there. Cuts down on all that extra fat, trims it like a packer in 1906 in Chicago.

Yeah. And there are probably people out there that are saying, well, you could drop the word like in a lot of these instances, maybe not the million dollars one and stuff like that. But you could say in that sentence, who can afford this stuff? And I get that, but that doesn't mean that putting like in is bad necessarily.

Right. And who wants to sound like Larry David all the time? Nobody.

Larry David.

Yeah, I guess.

What else? What's surprise?

It's funny. It gets across surprise, but you have to use it in a really unsurprised tone for it to be effective. So for example, if somebody you would not expect showed up at a party and you went, she's here, you can kind of get that across. I'm really surprised that she's here. I'm maybe a little chilled that she's here. She should not be here, that kind of thing. But if you say she's like here, that really gets it across. Gets it across a little better. But you can't be like she's like here. That doesn't work. You have to tone it down and do the opposite and then it conveys surprise. It's fascinating. It's amazing that this is how we talk and nobody's writing this stuff down. The linguists are writing this stuff down from studying what people are doing in real time in conversation. This is not part of the modern language Association's handbook.

Yeah, for sure. The last one we're going to talk about is as a discourse particle. And this is the real bad guy as far as like haters go, don't you think?

Probably, yeah.

I mean, this is the one that people will say is clearly just inserted in there as filler. It is the one that is infecting our language is this discourse particle use. And that is, I believe the woman who wrote the book, Alexandra Darcy, she's a linguist, said, I believe a PhD, if I'm not mistaken, said that using it as a discourse particle doesn't change the meaning of a sentence necessarily, but it does set a tone and operates in the interpersonal realm.

Exactly right. So, for example, if you are talking about somebody who you just like, they've made some bad life choices or whatever, and you're expressing this to somebody else, but you don't want to make it sound like you don't like that person, like you want to express that you still like that person, but they've made some bad life choices, and you're a little disappointed in that. You could say two things. You could say, I love her, but she's dumb. Right? You sound kind of like a jerk. So what you can do is use, like, you can pepper sentences with like to kind of pad it. For example, you would say, like, I love her, but she's like dumb. It gets across to the listener like, hey, I still care about this person. I'm not really putting them down. I'm just trying to get across some stuff that, I'm just getting something off.

My chest here between you and sort of, it works as a softener. Like this example too. If someone asked you to go do something like, hey, Josh, you want to go to dinner? And you said, sorry, I'm tired, that's like, oh, well, Josh clearly doesn't want to have dinner with me.

Correct.

But if you said, sorry, I'm just like really tired, then that just softens things. Like the interpretation is, I would really love to go to dinner with you, but I'm tired.

Correct.

And you don't have to say all that other stuff.

No. So it's a softener. That's a really great way to put it. I think that's how John McCorder put it, the linguist. And it also works in reverse, too, because it acts as a shielding. Right. You're shielding the other person's feelings by adding those likes. You're saying, like, I don't dislike you. I'm not trying to be mean here. I know you're probably going to be disappointed. So I want to just kind of get this information across as gently as possible. And peppering it with likes does that. But like I said, it works in reverse. It shields the speaker, too. In some cases, it acts as a hedge to where you're giving yourself plausible deniability. You're not saying I'm 100% confident in what I'm saying. I'm pretty sure. But because I'm adding, like, it's hedging it so that if I'm wrong, it's not the end of the world. It's not that much egg on my face. So if somebody asked what you were or what you did for a living and I didn't know, I could say, I think, like, he's a podcaster, or I think he's like a podcaster. It just hedges it a little bit, and it protects the speaker in this case, rather than protects the receiver.

But it's the same function, essentially. Yeah.

I mean, we do that all the time when we're just pulling something off the dome we're not sure about.

Yeah. But people still email in and tell me how wrong, wrong I am.

Well, Alexandria Darcy would say that if you use like, as a discourse particle, then that means that you are emotionally intelligent. That means you have very much an awareness of who you're speaking to and how your words are being received. And there have been studies that have shown that when people hear speech that do not have like or other discourse particles and, you know, is another one, that people sound robotic and unfriendly and unnatural, and that these discourse particles conversationally make people feel at ease, it's almost.

Like hard water, and the likes are water softeners, right? It's the best I can come up with.

Should we take another break?

Yes.

All right. We will be right back. Burn.

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So, Chuck, if you ask people, even people use the word like, where did the use of like, come from? When did we start using, like, in English spoken English? Most people would, if given the chance to think about it, say Valley girls. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's Valley girls. Valley girls or teletubbies, one of the two. And you'd be like, it wasn't teletubbies. But also, it wasn't Valley girls. Valley girls popularized it, but we were using, like, way before. But one of the reasons why people think Valley girls is in part because of a 1982 song by Frank Zappa that introduced valley girls to the United States. Like, they were pretty much confined to the San Fernando Valley until that Frank Zappa song came along, I think.

Yeah. And this is part of greater Los Angeles, if you're not familiar. But in 82, he put out the song Valley girl with his daughter, Moon Zappa. And it really sort of mocked that way of speaking. The movie Valley girl, it was not for the movie. The movie came out a year later, and that obviously made it even more popular. Other movies, like fast times at Ridgemont High, and then later in the clueless, which brought other terms that a lot of people hate, like, whatever. And as if. But like you said, these things really popularize it. It didn't invent it, and we know it because there's actual proof. If you go back even just a little while and look at history in the 1950s and 1960s with the beats and the hep talk or jive talk. Bebop. They were saying like crazy and writing it in their books, it was all over the place.

Yeah. So Dave gives some examples of bop talk or jive talk or jazz talk. Crazy was one. We use that a lot. Cool. The tops. That reminds me of Mel tormay. Gone, as in gone girl. Dig hip. And then he includes et cetera, which I didn't realize was bop talk. Thought that was Latin.

That's funny. You almost got me. But they would use the word like a lot. Like, that cat is like, crazy, or like, he is so square, or like, I was really groovin. They used it basically in the exact same way, approximate adverbs, discourse markers, and discourse particles.

Right.

The same way Valley girls in the 80s used it. And the same way people of all stripes use it today. Yeah.

And if you were into jazz at the time, you were probably somewhat familiar of bop talk, but it filtered into the beats, who kind of introduced it to an even wider audience in the United States. Like, it pops up here or there and on the road from Jack Carawack.

Sure.

So we know at least as far back as the beats, and probably before that, with jazz musicians in the 40s. Like was used in the same slangy way that we use it now. Multiple ways we use it now. But the valley girls are the ones that seem to have introduced or at least popularized the latest version or use of like, which is that quotative version where it sets up a paraphrase quote.

Yeah, and I think they did not find. And they dug around. I believe that Darcy, in her book, found uses in England in the 19th century, where they would use the word like in several different ways that we use it now. But that one. What was it called again?

What, the quotative use?

Yeah, the quotative. That's the one that seems to have really been truly born in the.

It's probable or possible that valley girls did not make that up, but it became part of Valley girl val speak, along with, like, gag me with the spoon and totally tubular.

All teenagers talked like that back then.

Yeah. But apparently ground zero for it was the valley that. That's where it emerged from. At the very least, that's where people thought that it emerged from.

I think it's that kids in Ohio.

Weren'T necessarily talking like that. I know my sisters didn't talk like that until those movies came out.

I heard stuff like that. I think it popularized it. But I think teenagers were. I mean, maybe not some of the particular phrases, but the use of like was definitely around before that movie.

Okay. No, for sure.

Popularly.

Right. Okay. But most people point to or were exposed to it from Valley girls, not the movie. I'm saying, like, the concept, the social trend. Valley girls.

Right. Because of the movie.

Right. So that's the one that most people associate with Valley girls for a reason. They're the ones who popularize it. But people blame Valley girls for the whole use of like in a lot of ways, and it's kind of translated since the early 80s. Into young girls. You don't have to be valley girls. Like, the idea is just young girls talk like that. They're the ones who use, like, all the time. They are infecting the language. That's what some people think. And that apparently is not just incorrect factually. It's pretty sexist in the way that that disco demolition night riot where people were just going crazy on disco records in Chicago was homophobic.

Yeah. And racist.

Yeah.

For mean. You know, there's a history that still goes on today of sort of thinly veiled coded. It's not okay to make fun of someone because of their age or because of their gender identity or their ethnicity or something, but it's still generally okay to make fun of the way someone might talk. And that oftentimes is coded, in this case, for young women.

Yeah. Because kind of as a rule, the contributions, the intellectual contributions of young women in the United States are not, there's not a huge high emphasis on traditionally there hasn't been, especially among older men. They're very much looked down upon. But again, you can't just be like, you're stupid because you're a 20 year old girl. But you could say, like, you sound really immature because you use like a lot. It's still the same thing. You've just found a different entree into devaluing that person's contributions or that group's contributions.

Well, I mean, you need not look any further than someone like Greta Thornberg.

Use like a lot.

No, I'm just talking about when she first came on the scene, sort of all you heard about was like, oh, this young girl.

This young girl, she's a rabble rouser.

I think it's know, generally derisively by a lot of people, generally older men in politics, for sure.

Sure. Yeah, no, that's a great example of it. So I said factually, that doesn't make, it's not accurate. Our linguist heroes Darcy and Catherine Kinsler and others have studied this. They actually do studies to find out who actually uses like. And they found that in general, just using like, men and women use it with about the same frequency. But when you dig down a little further, you drill down into it to get into the real granular meat of the whole subject. Kind of like a 19 six packer in Chicago with a really sharp knife. In tuberculosis, you find that there are distinctions between age and gender in the use of like, in different ways.

Yeah, for sure. So what they found was for the approximate adverb form, meaning almost or just about men and women use it equally. The discourse particle, like the softener or the interpersonal. Like, men actually use it more frequently than women. The discourse particle form like. What's a good example there?

The discourse marker would be like, emphasis, like, have you seen.

Okay, yeah, that one. They found that women do use it more frequently. The big one was the new kid on the block in the quotative complimentizer.

It's such a stupid word.

It really is. That's the one that is significantly used more frequently by women than men.

Yeah. And also, there's this idea that it's just the younger generations that use it, and the younger generations definitely use it more frequently and in more interesting and diverse ways, but it still filters to other age groups. And there's apparently, Darcy included some quotes from Brits in their. Who were using like, in ways that we recognize as the slang uses of like. Like, one of them said, a 75 year old respondent said they were just, like, sitting waiting to die. Can you do a 75 year old british woman impression?

I don't think so.

Okay.

Yeah. I mean, clear examples of people of a certain age using the word like. Again, the one big exception is the quotative like, which supposedly women use or not supposedly, I guess they found in their study, use more than men. And it's also almost exclusively used by younger people. But again, younger people are always the ones that are changing language and thinking up new words and trying out new usages since the beginning of time. Yeah.

So there's a larger question that we still haven't fully answered. Do the people who hate like and say, it's infecting the language? Do they have a point? And turns out the answer is no, not really. They have some sort of weird personal vendetta, which may or may not be sexist in nature or ageist, at least that if you look at how the word like is used, it provides all sorts of unique functions that other words don't necessarily fill. Like, remember I said approximately would work in some cases, but not in other cases. Like, has carved, or we've used, like, to carve out or fill voids that no other words had filled before in spoken english language. And yes, it looks weird on paper, but we're not talking about on paper. We're talking about in a conversation. And like is a way that people make sure that you're with them still when they're talking to you, that you feel included, that your feelings are being acknowledged. It provides all sorts of really interesting functions.

It does. And in short, it's just the way people talk generally?

Yes, for sure. All right, well, if you want to know more about, like, just start listening and you will drive yourself mad. And if you don't feel like doing that, just read some linguistic papers on it. There's some interesting stuff out there. And since I said that it's time for listener mail, I'm going to call.

This Simpsons clue the board game. Hey, guys, just finished to the episode on Clue. I am so excited to tell you this about the Simpsons Clue board game. Maybe you saw it in your research, but it is so on brand for you two. Had to make sure that you were aware of its existence in the game. Mr. Burns is murdered, and the characters are Marge as Mrs. Peacock, Homer as Mr. Green, Lisa as Miss Scarlett, Bart as Professor Plum, Krusty as Colonel Mustard, and Smithers as Mrs. White. Apparently, this was later changed. Okay. The weapons included Lisa's saxophone, plutonium rod, Bart's slingshot, Lisa's necklace, extendo glove, and a poisoned doughnut. The locations are obviously all around Springfield. You got Moe's, the retirement castle, the Simpsons house, Mr. Burns office, and the quickie Mart. And of course, there are lots of Easter eggs. It's just so perfect. As a kid that religiously watched the Simpsons reruns every night, getting Simpsons Clue was the best birthday present I could think of and the only version I have ever had. Thank you for all the hours of entertainment and third wheeling to your conversations. Or I guess, fourth wheeling with Jerry.

I love you guys. That is from Margaret Nihoff.

Thanks, Margaret. That was a great email. I really feel the urge to go out and buy the Simpsons clue totally. If you want to subliminally act upon us in some sort of way that hopefully is helpful, like getting us to want to buy a really great board game like Margaret did, you can get in touch with us too. Send us a very nice email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com.

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