The president of the Pioneer Toastmasters Club, Brian Reublinger, told me about a 2023 book by linguistics professor Valerie Fridland titled Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the good in bad English. Linguistics is descriptive rather than prescriptive. English professors, public speaking coaches, and other pedants will tell us what we should be doing. For example, there is an article on filler words by Joel Schwartzberg in the February 2019 issue of Toastmaster magazine on pages 14 and 15 titled Drop Those Crutches. In contrast, linguists tell us what we are doing, why we do it, and where it came from. I got Like, Literally, Dude from my friendly local public library and am enjoying reading it. You can find excerpts from it at Google Books.
Chapter 2 on Pages 65 to 97 is titled Umloved. It has the following section titles:
What the uh?
The ums of antiquity?
A Freudian um?
Brain farts
Comprendo?
Men-o-pausal patterns
Staging an um-prising?
Umdone
On pages 80 and 81 the Comprendo? section says:
“Go to any public-speaking class and I can pretty much guarantee that they will not be advising you to ‘um’ more. As a matter of fact, pretty much any public-speaking course worth its salt will give you tips and pointers on how not to be disfluent, rather than give you gold stars for how many ums you can produce during one PowerPoint presentation. But that is why they pay linguists the big bucks and public-speaking coaches get crickets. Um Okay, maybe I have that backward. That’s why they should be paying us the big bucks. Because we linguists have read the psycholinguistic research that suggests we have been wrong to ban hesitation from our talk. Just because we have been conditioned by our speech teacher to avoid using them or lost our lunch money to Toastmasters International, we find little scientific evidence that suggests they actually deserve such a negative reputation. In fact, the most fascinating area of hesitation research is not on why we ‘um’ but on how our ums and uhs might actually be a speaking superpower.
How is this possible? Because our ums and uhs, along with other signs of disfluencies like false starts (sa – say what?) seem to signal to our listeners to be on alert that there is something requiring greater cognitive effort happening. Why would this be useful from a comprehension standpoint? Because it leads us to expect the unexpected; we don’t get sidetracked by anticipating easy words or simple sentences, because we know disfluencies tend to accompany harder linguistic choices. Let’s unpack this a bit by looking at what some of this research can tell us.
Our hesitations seem to act as pretty significant comprehension aids for our listeners. For instance, in one research study, participants were aske to move a mouse to select an object from two choices on a computer screen after hearing a prompt. The trick was that one of the objects had been previously mentioned during the study and the other had not. When the experimental instructions included an um before the name of the object to select, participants were not only more likely to be faster at identifying the unmentioned object, but they also started moving the cursor in that object’s direction before the um was even finished. It seemed the um clued the listener in to which word was more likely to be said (the unmentioned one) because they understood um’s role of marking something unfamiliar. This effect did not occur when the researchers used a same-length background noise instead of the filled pause. The um made them do it."
[When we skip to page 86 we find something I blogged about on February 13, 2014 in a post titled Adding a few uhs and ums improved recall of plot points in stories]:
"This advantage for memory and speed has been well studied – experiments testing disfluency effects on comprehension have pretty consistently illustrated recall and processing-time benefits when a filled pause is part of the stimuli. And the benefits are not just on word recall – we also seem to remember stories better when uh or um enter the picture. In an experiment [Ref. 86] testing how well people performed at recalling specific parts of the story Alice in Wonderland, participants showed better recall when they heard recordings with filled pauses occurring before some plot points, such as’ Meanwhile, … uh …, the cook keeps hurling plates and other items at the Duchess.’ Equivalently timed coughing inserted into the passages at the same points, though, didn’t help them out in recalling those plot points later. In fact, the coughs seemed to impair recall. So it is specifically the uh that does the trick.”
Chapter 3 on pages 99 to 123 is titled What’s Not to Like? It has sections titled:
Like, why?
The trouble with like
Approximately something
Laser pointers
The plot thickens
Old dogs, new tricks
What women like
To like or not to like?
It begins as follows [pages 99 to 104]:
“Walk into any middle school in America and there’s one word you’ll hear echoing down the hallway that has taken on more than its fair share of shade. No, it doesn’t rhyme with ‘luck’ or ‘hit.’ This one rhymes with ‘hike’ and should be wildly familiar to anyone who’s seen the movies Valley Girl or Clueless. While ‘fer sure’ and ‘totally gnarly’ have faded into the SoCal sunset, the presence of like has only expanded, punctuating every sentence from Los Angeles to New York.
The frequent use of like may sound juvenile, but it has taken over our linguistic nooks and crannies in almost every variety of global English. It appears at the beginning of sentences, in the middle of clauses, and now it even introduces quotes. The funny thing is, despite its pervasiveness, hardly anyone claims to like this new type of like. Even those who admit to using it themselves rarely remark on it as a positive attribute. Case in point: When I ask my college students to name the things that bug them the most about language, like is always at the top of the list, comically appearing in the very sentence that denigrates it: ‘I hate how people, like use like all the time.’ Once the offending word is mentioned, the students can’t stop noticing how often it pops up in everyone’s speech for the rest of the class period – and then the rest of the day, week, month, and year. The fact is, like it or not, like use is here to stay. But before condemning it as a sign of impending linguistic ruin, let’s take some time to consider why like might have entered our speech in the first place. As I tell my students, maybe, just maybe, there is more to like than we might at first believe.
Like, why?
The expanded use of like is so widespread that news outlets ranging from The Atlantic to Time to Vanity Fair to The New York Times have covered what seems to be its troubling and meteoric rise. One online college advice site has a post headlined ‘How to Stop Saying Like and Immediately Sound Smarter’; a speech-improvement service calls it ‘The Like Epidemic,’; the Chronicle of Higher Education asks that we ‘Diss Like’; and in Vanity Fair Christopher Hitchens called it ‘The other L-word.’ Across global English varieties, concerned parents worry about this troublesome habit. One mother, echoing the apprehensions of many, appeals for help from the advice expert at the UK’s The Guardian, fretting that her teenager’s like use sounds uneducated and will affect her success in the future. Teachers also report that its prevalent use in class is becoming problematic. In fact, a friend of mine, who is a middle school teacher recently told me that it’s her students’ number one verbal tic. This collective hand-wringing leaves little doubt that we have little love for like. So then why do we continue to use it?
Ask most parents and they’ll probably say it has something to do with adolescent laziness or linguistic rebellion. Ask most employers and they’ll probably say it has to do with a shift from a more formal workplace to a casual, less professional setting. Ask most linguists, though, and they’ll probably tell you we’re missing the mark. Like used in such contexts is not much different from other markers that we have used through the centuries to help us organize and structure our speech. In other words, there is nothing that unique or concerning about it.
Though we might not realize it, English has an arsenal of pragmatic-oriented features of speech, such as so, you know, actually, and oh. As with our now beloved ums and uhs, these discourse markers don’t directly contribute to the literal (semantic) content of a sentence. Instead, when added, they contribute to how we understand each other by providing clues to a speaker’s intentions. For instance, when I say. ‘Oh, I finally got a job!’ my use of oh is a shorthand way to prompt a listener to mimic my surprise. Discourse markers provide the social greasing of the conversational wheel. Without them, our speech would sound less conversational and more computer-like. In fact, try having a conversation without using any discourse markers. Not only will you find it quite difficult, but others will find you a less appealing speaker.
Discourse markers are by no means new or unusual Shakespeare made liberal use of them, and the epic poem Beowulf even begins with one (Hwoet!). Suggestively, historical texts that date back to the old English and Middle English periods (fifth to eleventh century and twelfth to fifteenth century, respectively) have shown evidence of words functioning similarly to modern discourse markers. For instance, the Old English word pa, meaning ‘then,’ served as a foregrounding discourse marker in narratives and was often associated with colloquial speech. As a matter of fact, some Old English scholars suggest pa occurred so often in some early texts that it can’t have carried much semantic content, a complaint that echoes our modern assessment of excessive like use. Less controversial, Old English hwoet, meaning ‘what,’ seems to have served as an attention-getting device roughly similar to the modern sentence’s initial so. As the opener to Beowulf, it’s a signal to the audience that something worth paying attention to will follow. In more recent times – at least if you consider the early modern period (fifteenth through seventeenth century) recent – interjections such as alas, ah, and fie, among others, similarly functioned to give a sense of a speaker’s intentions or emotions (alas, ‘tis true). Though charming to our ears, these DMs may well have been painful to parents of the early modern era.
Looking back, we find that the origins of the word like are similarly rooted in the Middle English and early modern period. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) first notes the use of like in its adjectival and verbal functions – as lich (adjective) and lician (verb), respectively – as early as 1200, with noun, conjunction, and prepositional uses noted around 1400 – 1500. The use of like as a conversational marker shows up later, though much earlier than we might have expected. The OED cites a passage from a text written in 1778 (F. Burney’s Evelina II), where it is used to qualify the speaker’s subsequent remark, ‘Father grew quite uneasy, like, for fear of his Lordship’s taking offense.’ It also cites another example employing like in this way in 1840, in a magazine of the era: ‘Why like, it’s gaily nigh like, to four mile like.’ And hinting at the source of like’s vibe of hip vernacularity, the OED gives a more recent example from a beat-influenced magazine, where we locate like occurring in its now familiar spot at the beginning of a sentence – ‘Like how much can you lay on (i.e., give) me?’ (from Neurotica Autumn 45).”
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