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Published on 7/4/08
Published on 7/2/08
Video
As a writer and English-teacher-in-training, precision in language is the centerpiece of my craft. Nonetheless, I recently realized that my, like, regular speech was more Angela Chase than Mr. Katimski. I needed to break the habit, pronto.
And so on October 29, I went cold turkey. For a full month, unless I was explaining preferences (“I really like pasta”) or fashioning sparkling similes (“Life without pasta is like a slow, painful death”), the word was not to pass my lips. And my friends would be armed with buzzers to “errr” every slip.
At first, my like-free sentences sounded too blunt, with a new, ugly rhythm that tripped me up. Ugh. After a week, I was still slipping up about thirty times daily, but I’d identified my problem. There were two very different likes to be banished: the kind that can be stuck anywhere and that our parents associate with valley girls (“He is, like, so cute!”), and the kind that serves a similar function to “said” or “thought” (“And I was like, ‘Too bad he’s a Republican’ ”).
According to linguist Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain, this latter quotative like “does things that you can’t duplicate with other quotatives.” Using it signifies that a nonliteral description of speech or thoughts will follow, accompanied by imitative facial expressions and tone. This is what I really had trouble giving up. I pride myself on my storytelling skills, and without the quotative like, I sounded like a bizarre book on tape.
Three weeks in, I was down to four slips a day, and by November 29, I sounded smarter and more mature than I ever had. I’m now allowed to go back to saying like—and my old friend the QL is sneaking back into my stories—but a month later, without thinking about it, I’m still relatively free of the word. Mr. Katimski would be proud.
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