The Awful "Like" Word

About the Author

For 24 years, Ed Good served as counsel and writer-in-residence at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina and his law degree from the University of Virginia.

Currently, Ed conducts on-site training programs in effective writing for law firms, corporations, and government agencies. Email him at [email protected] or call him on his cell at 240-GRAMMAR (240-472-6627).

Ed recently published his first novel, a parody and satire: Mocko Man - The Next-to-Last Diet Book on Earth. It mocks the diet industry, exercise spas, television ads, the fitness craze, and just about everything else. Visit Amazon.

Like, I’mlike Gonna Learn How to Like Talk

If you have a “like” habit, the time has come: Break it. Many people cannot make it through a single sentence without scores of “I’m like” and “She was like” and “She’s all . . . .” For good measure, they throw in the like word as adjectives, adverbs, and indecipherable constructions.

Break the Habit

In the late 1980s, the Drug Enforcement Administration dispatched a crack team of enforcers to a southern university. They struck pay dirt, finding drug paraphernalia in several fraternity houses. Editors of The Washington Post dispatched their crack team of reporters (or perhaps their team of crack reporters) to gauge student reaction. In its story, the Post included one of those boxed quotations designed to attract attention to the article.

Unfortunately for the university’s public-relations department, the Post quoted a student who summed up the reaction this way:

“We were like, ‘Whoa!’”

Millions of Post readers scratched their heads, wondering just exactly what the students thought of the DEA raid. Did they endorse it? Did they find it incredibly funny? Did they feel a sense of outrage? Relief? Fear? Shame?

We know very little, of course, only that students “were like, ‘Whoa.’” We can fill in the blanks. The expression means whatever we want.

Substitute for Thought

Like every generation before it (we Boomers used ya know a lot), the youth of today have devised their own expression as a substitute for thought—a new verb, tobelike, spelled just like that, spoken just like that, as a single word, often joined permanently to its subject.

We can conjugate this new verb: tobelike.

In the present tense, “I’mlike.”

In the past tense, “Iwaslike.”

On the subway once, I heard a person say in the future tense, “I’llbelike.”

Introducing Quotations with the Like Word

Usually, people use tobelike to introduce quoted sources. In that form, it doesn’t harm the language too much or totally prevent thought from taking place. We can hear entire conversations, peppered with the verb tobelike and gobs of likes thrown in for good measure, and come away at least marginally informed.

Thus, a law student might describe his experience in class to a friend this way:

My professor waslike, “Does the Bill of Rights apply to the states?”

And I waslike, “In most cases, yes.”

And she waslike, “Well, when do these rights not apply?”

So I waslike trying to remember the case law, but she waslike rushed for an answer so she like went on to like the next guy.

The student manages to convey some meaning. But he cannot look forward to any awards for elocution.

A Ubiquitous Word

Sadly, the verb tobelike and other variations of the like word do more than introduce quotations. They pervade many people’s speech. They threaten the language—and therefore thought itself. Tobelike and like often require the speaker to resort to wild gesticulations of hand and arm, accompanied by guttural grunts and groans.

Thus, we might hear two people share the hardships of the day:

He: “I’mlike up to here.” (Hand and forearm, parallel to the ground, rise to level of eyebrow.)

She: “Like yeah.” (Heel of hand, with fingers curled to back of head, strikes center of forehead.)

He: “Like yesterday waslike, ‘Ugh!’” (The theme begins to develop.)

She: “I’mlike, oh well, you know.” (Gentle but rhythmic nods of total understanding.)

He: “So you’llbelike, with it.” (Presumably a question denoting sympathy.)

She: “I’mlike . . . you know. What EVer.” (Mutual nods of assent to newly shared precepts.)

Perhaps I exaggerate. But I do so to make a point: If people talk this way, quite likely they will find writing even more difficult. One trend I have observed: People with the like habit overuse the verb to be in their writing. They simply cannot write a sentence without saying “something is this” or “something was that.” [In my next article, I'll introduce you to a language called E-Prime, which has abolished the verb to be.]

When I teach courses in persuasive writing, as an exercise I urge the participants to write and speak at some length without using the verb to be and the like word at all. When they try it out, they often get tongue-tied or contract a case of writer’s block. But after a while, they catch on to the magic of speaking without thought-stopping expressions and of writing with verb-based prose.

Parents, Take Note

Parents might try the exercise out on their children. Bribe them. Put a $10 bill on the breakfast table and challenge them to make it through a second helping of waffles without using the tobelike verb and without misusing the like word. Up it to $100. Your money’s safe.

Like as a Verb

If your children ask about the correct meaning of like, point out that it serves as a verb, all by itself. Your children can say, “I like waffles” or “I would like another serving.”

Like as a Preposition

Point out that it also serves as a preposition and in that capacity hooks nouns to sentences. Your children can say, “He runs like the wind.”

Indeed, go ahead and point out that to be can join like if they truly want to show what something or somebody was like.

Thus the commercial “I want to be like Mike” has its grammar in order.

So does “He was like a father to me.”

But virtually everyone addicted to the like word uses it to show not what something is like but what something actually is. They use it to show identity (is), not similarity (like): He’s like tall. Well, is he or isn’t he?

Like as a Noun

You can also point out that like serves as a noun, as in likes and dislikes.

Like as an Adjective

The word spans almost all parts of speech and can serve as an adjective (she mastered lacrosse, field hockey, and like sports).

Like as an Adverb

Informally, like can serve as an adverb (the tree is more like 100 than 50 feet).

Like as a Conjunction

Here we stir up a hornet’s nest. According to some sources, the word like can also act as a subordinating conjunction (a word starting a dependent clause).

Charles Darwin wrote in 1866:

Unfortunately few have observed like you have done. [1]

Consider the words of Random House:

Like as a conjunction meaning “as, in the same way as” ( Many shoppers study the food ads like brokers study market reports) or “as if” ( It looks like it will rain) has been used for nearly 500 years and by many distinguished literary and intellectual figures. Since the mid-19th century there have been objections, often vehement, to these uses. Nevertheless, such uses are almost universal today in all but the most formal speech and writing. In extremely careful speech and in much formal writing, as, as if, and as though are more commonly used than like: The commanding general accepted full responsibility for the incident, as any professional soldier would. Many of the Greenwich Village bohemians lived as if (or as though) there were no tomorrow. [2]

Other sources fervently disagree with this loose approach. Mr. Henry Fowler, the great English grammarian, minced no words:

Every illiterate person uses this construction daily . . . . [3]

The Oxford English Dictionary notes that examples of the use of like as a conjunction do appear in the works of “many recent writers of standing” but also points out that such use is “generally condemned as vulgar or slovenly . . . .”[4]

Like as a Conjunction: Four Uses

Henry Fowler examined the works of leading writers in England, America, and other countries, and identified four situations where they use like as a conjunction:

1. The If you knew Susie Exception: Repeat the Verb

In the subordinate clause, writers often repeat the verb appearing in the main clause. They introduce the subordinate clause with like:

I need a new car like I need a hole in the head.

If you knew Susie like I know Susie . . . .

Mr. Fowler’s Comment: “[This construction] must surely escape further censure or reproach.”[5]

The following examples and comments appear in Fowler, at 458.

2. To Replace As If or As Though

It looks like it’s still a fox. —New Yorker, 1986.

3. The Like I said Exception

Substitutes for as in “fixed, somewhat jocular, phrases of saying and telling . . . .”

Like you say, you’re a dead woman. —M. Wesley, 1983.

4. To Make Comparisons

Used in the same way as “in the manner (that)” or “in the way (that).”

How was I to know she’d turn out like she did? —C. Burns, 1985.

As a budding grammarian, you should know of this battle. At Bubba’s Bar & Grille you can easily get away with using like as a conjunction. But in formal settings—the faculty lounge, scholarly writing (and talking), your master’s thesis—you should use the traditional conjunctions as, as if, and as though. In the words of Mr. Fowler:

It would appear that in many kinds of written and spoken English like as a conjunction is struggling towards acceptable standard or neutral ground. It is not there yet. But the distributional patterns suggest that the long-standing resistance to this omnipresent little word is beginning to crumble. [6]

Overusing Like Threatens Your Career

Consider the views of the experts:

Henry Fowler

By the mid-20c., however, [the use of like] as an incoherent and prevalent filler had reached the proportions of an epidemic, and it is now scorned by standard speakers as a vulgarism of the first order. [7]

Bryan Garner

Since the 1980s, be like is also a juvenile colloquialism equivalent to said in relating a conversation—e.g.: “And I was like, ‘Yes, I do.’ But he was like, ‘No you don’t. And so I was like, ‘If you’re just going to contradict me, then . . . .’“ In teenagers, this usage is all but ubiquitous. In adults, it shows arrested development. [8]

Urge your children to stay away from tobelike. Point out that saying “She was like tall” says nothing at all. And vigorously stress that grunts and groans and “like . . . ah . . . like this” and “like . . . um . . . ah . . . like that” peg the speaker as one who has some work to do before taking control of the language.

And if you write or talk for a living—as most of us do—try the exercise yourself. Listen to your own patterns of speech. I have a friend, my age, a Boomer. He has picked up the like habit from his teenager.

If you use tobelike and misuse the like word, just stop it. Then try writing an article like this one, and in 1,953 words see if you can use the verb to be—as I have—only twice. (Can you find them? The be’s in the examples and quotations don’t count.)

Go ahead. Try it out.

You’llbelike, “Whoa!”

___________________________________________________________1. Henry W. Fowler, The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage 458 (Clarendon Press, 3d ed. 1996).

2. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language 1114 (2d ed. 1987).

3. Fowler, at 458.

4. Quoted in Fowler, at 458.

5. Id.

6. Fowler, at 459.

7. Id.

8. Bryan A. Garner, The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style 212 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000).

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