Do you, like, like LIKE?
LIKE is often used and often reviled these days, but not everyone realises that LIKE has a long history. And it follows regular patterns — patterns we seem to know instinctively, but which we have a hard time articulating. How did LIKE get this way, and should you be trying to stop using it?
Daniel talks to sociolinguist Alexandra D’Arcy on this episode of Talk the Talk.
Listen to this episode
You can listen to all the episodes of Talk the Talk by pasting this URL into your podlistener.
http://danielmidgley.com/talkthetalk/talk_classic.xmlFull interview
Here’s the full audio of the interview. Daniel and Alex discuss the history of LIKE, the evolution of its syntactic behaviour, its roles in discourse, and the social aspect of its use.
Like (excerpt)
Cutting Room Floor
First, a chat about philosophy, and its relation to empiricism. Then: why Ben doesn’t like The Walking Dead, and how he violated his cardinal rule on Daniel’s behalf.
Let’s just all savour the fact that India has a Ministry for Social Justice and Empowerment. But not for too long, because we need to savour Daniel’s smoky morning voice, and Ben’s ideas about teacher talk and accommodation.
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Show notes
Signs of Australia : a new dictionary of Auslan (the sign language of the Australian deaf community) / edited by Trevor Johnston
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/377262
Coming soon: First-of-its-kind Indian sign language dictionary
http://indianexpress.com/article/india/coming-soon-first-of-its-kind-indian-sign-language-dictionary-4487058/
The people behind India’s first sign language dictionary
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-39101899
Ethnologue: Indian Sign Language
https://www.ethnologue.com/language/ins
Empowering the Deaf
http://indiansignlanguage.org
Giphy Collects Together Thousands Of Animated GIFs To Help You Learn Sign Language
https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2017/02/giphy-collects-together-thousands-of-animated-gifs-to-help-you-learn-sign-language/
Call to give sign language official status
https://www.brandsouthafrica.com/governance/services/rights/disability-051212
Sign language users have better reaction times and peripheral vision
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170206084253.htm
Online Etymology Dictionary: like
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=like
Like, OMG! ‘Like’ Is, Like, Totally Cool, Linguist Says
http://www.themillions.com/2014/02/like-omg-like-is-like-totally-cool-linguist-says.html
Like, Why Do We Use Like So Much?
http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2017/02/john_mcwhorter_with_alexandra_d_arcy_on_the_word_like.html
Discourse markers are, like, important
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/01/21/discourse-markers-are-like-important/Y92NncxhOIiYsDWQHIkdvJ/story.html
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913
https://www.oldbaileyonline.org
Wiktionary: uberize
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uberize
How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html?_r=0
Uber’s unravelling: The stunning, 2 week string of blows that has upended the world’s most valuable startup
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/uber-scandal-recap-2017-3/?r=US&IR=T#/#sunday-february-19-the-beginning-1
Uberfy or Get Uberfied! The Psychology of Digital Disruption
http://digitalintelligencetoday.com/uberfy-or-get-uberfied-the-psychology-of-digital-disruption/
Sexism at Uber from female management #UberStory
https://medium.com/@contactkeala/sexism-at-uber-from-female-management-uberstory-238874075bbb#.w54lc2z4t
Much help from Word-Formation in English by Ingo Plag
https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Word_formation_in_English.html?id=78KFCIHtJS4C&redir_esc=y
What is the difference between the suffixes -ize and -ify
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/189530/what-is-the-difference-between-the-suffixes-ize-and-ify
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
[Talk the Talk RTRFM theme]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Talk the Talk RTRFM’s weekly show about linguistics, the science of language. For the next hour, we’re going to be bringing you language news, language change, and some great music, maybe we’ll even hear from you. My name is Daniel Midgley. I’m here with Ben Ainslie…
Ben: Good morning.
Daniel: …and Kylie Sturgess.
Kylie: Good. Hi, everyone.
Daniel: On this episode, we’re going to talk about, like… Yeah, we’re going to talk about LIKE.
Kylie: [laughs]
Daniel: This little word has worked its way into our language and our habits. How did it get there and how do we all know exactly where to put it in a sentence? We’re totally getting into it on this episode of Talk the Talk.
Kylie: I’m sorry, I had to laugh… [crosstalk]
[laughter]
Ben: No, that was good.
Daniel: Gotcha.
Kylie: [laughs]
Ben: Do you know that the word LIKE and the way that the youth use it was the very first example I can remember of classic language policing.
Daniel: Oh, you mean that was on the… [crosstalk]
Kylie: Being on the receiving end.
Daniel: On the wrong end.
Ben: Yeah, [crosstalk]
Kylie: I had a very lovely parent asked, if I could tutor their daughter in English based upon, “Oh, please, can you just stop her from saying LIKE all the time.”
Ben: Seriously. Yeah.
Kylie: We had a great time learning English. But they said that the thing that just rolled on the point, right? That’s it. [crosstalk] yes or no.
Ben: I think it might be an Australian or no… I don’t think it’s an Australian thing, but I think it’s more pronounced as in the older generation’s revulsion to the word LIKE because of the perceived cultural attachment, which is to say, it’s pretty American. And as we’ve established before, things that are British are less bad than things that are American.
Daniel: That’s what they say.
Ben: Or at least, that’s my parents’ generations take on it. And so, I think that was the reason what they heard their kids speaking, if not in American accents, but certainly in the affectations that they perceive to be standardly American and they were like, “No, we’re losing the youth to the American way.”
Kylie: It’s that The Simpsons program. [crosstalk]
Ben: Yeah. For sure. For sure.
Daniel: Oh, my god.
Ben: I had a lot of parents who hated The Simpsons, not because it was ripping the moral fabric in half, but because it was just clearly American.
Daniel: I See. Well, you know what, we’re going to be talking to somebody who knows a lot about LIKE, Dr. Alexandra D’Arcy of the University of Victoria.
Ben: But before we go down the rabbit hole of LIKE and rabbit hole, I presume it will be-
Daniel: I think so.
Ben: …we’ve got to find out about what’s going on in the world of linguistics in the week gone past.
Daniel: There’s something that’s coming up very soon, in fact, probably this month. It’s a language resource. It’s a dictionary. It’s a sign language dictionary and it’s for Indian sign language.
Ben: Okay. What does this sign language dictionary look like? First question, I need to know.
Kylie: Well, I can answer that. I’ve got a hard copy of the Auslan Dictionary at home, the symbols of … [crosstalk]
Daniel: Oh, my gosh, by Trevor Johnston.
Kylie: Yes, I can bring it in if you want to see a copy. Because I studied sign language very briefly in the 1990s. They gave us a DVD as well so you can pop it in and learn the sign language as you went [crosstalk] watching a video. Yeah.
Ben: Like video… [crosstalk]
Kylie: Yeah, like videos. But I’m certain that there must be an online version of it as well. I must check it. Yeah.
Daniel: I can tell you the answer to that, actually…
Kylie: Oh, good.
Daniel: …because GIPHY, the website that gives you lots of GIFs, has a lot of American sign language signs. When you search for stuff, they’ll just be mixed right in.
Ben: Oh, that’s fantastic.
Kylie: Oh, [crosstalk]
Daniel: Yeah, GIFs of people doing stuff.
Ben: I was fully expecting that to go in a meme direction. But from what I gather from your statement, it’s actually just like in a nice direction.
Daniel: Just a good way.
Ben: Yeah, that’s great. So, does the hard copy just have illustrations of the hands? Is that what it is?
Kylie: Yeah. And also, diagrams with dots, and lines, and [crosstalk] Yeah.
Ben: Oh, so, you just know how you move and… [crosstalk]
Kylie: Yeah, to the right, left, this way slower.
Ben: How interesting? Okay, well, there’s going to be one for Hindi.
Daniel: It’s not Hindi. It’s called Indian sign language… That’s what the website, Ethnologue, calls it, but some people call it Indo-Pakistani sign language. It is the language for about possibly as many as 10 million people.
Ben: Whoa.
Daniel: Just for comparison, that’s everyone who speaks the entire Czech language.
Kylie: Yeah, right and half the entire population of Australia.
Daniel: Because you know, India… [crosstalk] [laughs]
Kylie: Yeah, loads, lots of people.
Ben: Large.
Daniel: A lot of it is based on BSL, but a lot of signs have been modified as the language has changed and grown.
Kylie: No.
Ben: We’ve spoken on a couple of different shows about the propensity for sign language to be hyperclicky. Even within certain sign language schools, [unintelligible [00:04:37] signs and different almost sign language dialects can start to form and evolve really quickly. Surely in India, that must just be off the chain, like a little orphanage for deaf kids in Andhra Pradesh must be really different from stuff that’s on the border with Bangladesh and that sort of thing.
Kylie: I’ve got an article here by Shalini Nair in Indian Express, which talks about, “Coming soon, first of its kind Indian sign language dictionary.
Ben: Click on our blog, talkthetalkpodcast.com.
Kylie: Yeah. There’s villages like those in the Naga Hills and Alipur in another region, where they say, a history of high incidence of congenital deafness. So, they have their own variant of rural sign language. And so, this is why the Indian sign language research and training center is working on graphic representations, not only the widely used ones, but the regional variations as well.
Ben: Cool.
Daniel: Yeah, of course, there’s a lot of variation. There’s some debate over whether this is one language or several. Is it one language with lots of variation or could we actually split this up into several different languages?
Ben: Right.
Daniel: Kylie, you found something about South African sign languages.
Kylie: Yes, they have 11 official languages over there and now, they’re taking steps to have a 12th one, sign.
Ben: Wow.
Daniel: If that becomes an official language, it’ll get official support. It might be a rocky road to acceptance, but it will be a great thing for the equality of the people who speak it.
Kylie: Yeah, apparently, in South Africa, they’re still having huge issues with just having indigenous languages recognized, full stop, is a big thing.
Ben: Yeah, it is. Yeah.
Daniel: In other news, there’s a study out of the University of Sheffield, where they’ve taken a look at the visual abilities of people… That’s not even deaf people, but hearing people who have learned sign languages, and they find that a funny thing happens. When you speak assigned language, you get better visual field response, you have better peripheral vision.
Ben: Oh, yeah, I guess that would make sense.
Daniel: It’s one of those obvious things, but it’s cool that it happens in hearing people and of course, it happens in deaf people as well.
Kylie: Do you suppose that’s because at a conversational level, if you’re close enough to a speaker of a signed language, their hand movements will be drifting into peripheral vision fields, right?
Daniel: Yeah, it makes sense.
Kylie: Because when you’re quite close to someone, shoulder to shoulder could almost be drifting from inside main visual acuity and out of it.
Daniel: I guess, using a skill makes you good at using that skill.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah. This is one of those funny things though that annoys people with disabilities. There’s this idea and I don’t entirely accept it-
Ben: Oh, the heightened senses idea? Yeah.
Daniel: The heightened senses idea. When you lose one ability, you gain heightened senses in the other… [crosstalk]
Kylie: Blind people being in industries such as sound, for example.
Daniel: Yeah, a blind friend said to me, “My hearing sucks.”
[laughter]
Daniel: But the lead author on the study, Dr. Charlotte Codina, says this is probably evidence that there is such a thing as sensory compensation.
Ben: Well, my brain… I’m famous for being the nonscientist science hypothesis giver. But my hypothesis is that all of us have incredible sensory acuity that we just don’t ever develop, because we don’t ever have to. If you’re a hunter-gatherer whose caloric intake is dependent on being able to hear the faintest of twigs snaps from your quarry, you will have very good hearing, just like the rest of us could have if we needed to.
Daniel: So, this has been a little bit of the sign language roundup.
Ben: It’s a very positive week for those speaking sign languages around the world. Shall we take a track?
Daniel: Yeah, let’s listen to Star Sign by Teenage Fanclub on RTRFM 92.1. Remember, if you have any questions or comments about anything you hear, you can get those to us, 92609210, by email, talkthetalk@rtrfm.com.au, or our Facebook page or Twitter @talkrtr.
Ben: If you’re just tuning in on this episode of Talk the Talk, this week we’re talking like about LIKE, really.
Daniel: Like. Yeah.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Do you guys like LIKE?
Ben: I use LIKE a lot.
Kylie: I don’t think I do. Maybe I’ve pushed myself out of the habit. I’m not sure. See, I’m going to be very self-conscious about it from now.
Daniel: People are very bad at knowing what they actually do.
Kylie: Yeah. [crosstalk] Very bad.
Ben: Oh, absolutely. And I feel LIKE is a particularly cloaked member of the vocabulary. I feel like people are not aware.
Kylie: Yeah.
Ben: Way above normal levels of the usage of the word LIKE, because it’s just… [crosstalk]
Kylie: I use it all the time and I don’t realize.
Daniel: Well, now, you’re going to be aware of it.
Kylie: Oh.
Daniel: [laughs] I am an enthusiastic LIKE user. I use an example like this in class. I want you to tell me where LIKE would sound good or where it would sound terrible in this sentence.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: Everybody was Kung-Fu fighting.
Kylie: Everybody was like Kung-Fu fighting?
Ben: Where I would sound terrible. Like, everyone was Kung-Fu fighting.
Daniel: Even that sounds okay.
Kylie: That sounds okay.
Daniel: Okay.
Kylie: Everyone was Kung like Fu like fighting.
Daniel: [laughs] You cannot stick the like between the Kung and the Fu. That is not okay.
Kylie: Oh.
[laughter]
Ben: There’s a hyphen there for a reason.
Daniel: How about this one? I had to walk for 16 blocks.
Kylie: I had to like walk 16 blocks.
Ben: I had to walk for like 16 blocks.
Daniel: Yeah, either one of those two sounds pretty good, but it would sound terrible to say, “I had like to walk for 16 blocks.” Doesn’t… [crosstalk]
Ben: Hmm, okay. Yeah.
Kylie: I had like to walk 16 blocks to get there.
Daniel: You have to imagine a pretty extraordinary situation.
Kylie: Ah, yeah.
Daniel: How about this one? The doughnuts were just sitting there on the table.
Kylie: The doughnuts were like just sitting there on the table.
Ben: The doughnuts were just like sitting there on the table. Yeah, I agree.
Daniel: Yeah. Okay. I think it’s very interesting that we have ideas about where it goes although nobody teaches us these things. Isn’t that weird?
Ben: Well, no, it’s not weird at all. That’s grammar.
Daniel: Well, it is.
Ben: This is what we were discussing last week. We don’t know how any… Well, you do. You’re a linguist.
[laughter]
Ben: I assume you have a working understanding, but old schlubs like me have NFI about what the hell is going on with things like word order, and syntax, and all that malarkey.
Daniel: And yet, you have the feels, right?
Ben: Right. Yeah. [crosstalk]
Kylie: I think that’s where I’m mostly intuitive [crosstalk]
Ben: That’s the force. It’s languages version of the force. You just kind of do.
Daniel: That’s weird. We have all this knowledge, but we don’t have any conscious access to it.
Kylie: Yeah. It’s like when we’re making big green dragons in a sentence. How the hell did we do that?
Ben: There’s a word for this. I don’t know if it’s an appropriate word, but I think it’s an appropriate word. We have a tacit understanding-
Daniel: Yes.
Ben: …of grammar. If you ask a person to explain how they ride a bike, they’re not going to tell you that they have to lean slightly inwards to shift their weight, to turn the handlebars and to have to lean the opposite direction. No one actually knows that they do that. That’s tacit understanding. And I think grammar is the exact same way.
Daniel: I sometimes call it implicit language knowledge.
Ben: Right.
Daniel: Tell me, when you say LIKE in a sentence, what are you doing? Why are you doing that?
Ben: Does it serve the purpose of either example or metaphor?
Daniel: Example is pretty good. I like where you’re going with example.
Ben: Okay.
Kylie: It’s simile, usually, when we use LIKE or ‘as’, but we’re not using it as a simile in these cases. I always thought it was more like a breath, or a pause, or sometimes, the space of a comma. Like dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.
Daniel: It has a performative function. We say, he was like, “What are you doing here?” And I’m like, “I don’t know,” that kind of thing.
Ben: It seems like almost a transitionary function within a sentence to communicate to the receiver of the message, the sentence was one thing and now we’re transitioning into me expressing a different angle or a different perspective from the same sentence. So, your example just then was, and then he was like, “I don’t even know.” And I was like, “Yes, you do.” That transitioning is actually going from character to character within the sentence.
Daniel: It can do something else though. And the reason I know this is because I was talking to somebody who knows a lot about LIKE, Dr. Alexandra D’Arcy. She mentioned that one purpose of LIKE is to focus your attention.
Kylie: Oh.
Daniel: What you’re doing is, you’re actually saying, “This is new information that I don’t think you know.”
Ben: Ah. Not a red flag, just a flag.
Daniel: Exactly.
Ben: A sentence flag.
Daniel: Now, I had a big old chat with Dr. Alexandra D’Arcy of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. She’s written a book called Eight hundred years of LIKE.
Kylie: [giggles] What a great title.
Daniel: I know. So, she revealed to me the secrets of LIKE, especially how it got to be where it is in a sentence.
Alexandra: I think it was actually a fairly natural expansion. What we know in language changes that words have some core meaning. And often when words move into new jobs, they hold on to that bit of meaning or their semantics, in some sense stays with them. If you look at the history of that focus LIKE, what you see is that it started out, in fact, the end of a sentence. It’s not LIKE that we think of as being very iconic of Irish English. It was doing that in the 18th century already. What I’m talking about is the one in a sentence such as this. “He was quite gentle and quiet like,” where the LIKE at the end means it’s an adverb and it means “as it were”. So, you have that approximative core to it anyway. Then, it moves to the beginning of a sentence, which is a very easy jump, if you think about running speech. So, if you have two sentences in a row and you start at the end of the sentence, well, it’s a very easy flip in the structure to move to the front of the sentence.
Daniel: Oh, yeah.
Alexandra: When it goes to the beginning of the sentence, it keeps that… there’s a little bit of that approximative core there, but it also is doing things you could translate it if you wanted to put other words, where it means “For example,” or “Let me clarify” or “let me illustrate how these things go together.” And for that position at the beginning of the sentence, it then starts to go into the sentence where it continues hold on to that approximative core and that’s what allows you to focus and hedge.
Daniel: Whoa, it’s like a virus worming its way into the heart of the sentence.
Alexandra: Well, that’s exactly what it is. You can see it very clearly laid out. The one at the end of the sentence, it’s already there in the 18th century. But then, it goes to the beginning of the sentence with speakers born at the end of the 18th century, so the late 1700s. And then, by a century later, it has started to move into the sentence. So, it’s a very natural progression and you can see it laid out very clearly across generations of speakers.
Daniel: Since we mentioned the Irish sentence final LIKE, let’s talk about current rules of LIKE insertion. I was going through an example just yesterday with a class of mine and I use this example a lot. I asked my students to predict where the LIKE is going to be. It’s really easy. Everyone knows. The sentence is, “I had to walk for 16 blocks.” And everybody says… Go on.
Alexandra: I had to walk for like 16 blocks.
Daniel: [laughs] Exactly. I had to walk for like 16 blocks. Now, there are other places where you can do it, but there are some places where it just sounds absolute rubbish.
Alexandra: Yes.
Daniel: I had like to walk for 16 blocks. Everyone agrees that sounds terrible.
Alexandra: Yes. And that’s bad. That’s actually not grammatical.
Daniel: Yeah. And people are surprised when I say, “You know this thing that people do that you never had to learn in school?” Everybody does it the same way and everybody has the same feels about it except for my one Irish dude.
Alexandra: I love that you do that. I think that’s a fantastic exercise.
Daniel: [laughs] Yeah. Now, there’s an example that I want to go over and I’ve shared this with you earlier. This is allegedly from Roxy, a Justin Bieber fan. It doesn’t seem authentic to me and I can’t figure out why, but I’ll just read it and maybe you could help me out and figure out, if this is really an authentic quote that somebody would say or if it’s just concocted. I’ll read it here. This is about Justin Bieber. “He should like learn from his mistakes, but at the same time, like he’s like young still. And he just like there’s a lot of pressure like on him right now. I just like I just think people should just like back off.” Some of these ‘likes’ sound okay, but some of them sound terrible. What’s your take?
Alexandra: I love that you tripped.
Daniel: Yes.
Alexandra: There’s a lot of pressure like on him right now.
Daniel: It just didn’t sound right. I couldn’t put it there. [laughs]
Alexandra: Not natural. That is just not right.
Daniel: Yep. So, there’s a lot of pressure like on him right now. That’s a misplaced like.
Alexandra: It’s completely misplaced. Yeah, you could say, “There’s a lot of like pressure on him right now.” You could say, “There’s a lot of pressure on him like right now.”
Daniel: You could say, “There’s like a lot of pressure on him right now.”
Alexandra: Absolutely. Absolutely. But you can’t put the like between ‘pressure’ and ‘on’. ‘On’ starts a prepositional phrase. You never get like the four prepositional phrase, at least not yet. That’s one not even my son can do.
Daniel: Oh, not yet. So, is that what we’re going to see in the future?
Alexandra: I’m not ruling it out. It can definitely happen. There’s nothing structurally that blocks it from showing up there. It simply hasn’t made its way there yet. So, let me give you an example. I can say ‘at like’ the same time, but I can’t say ‘at the like’ same time, but my son can.
Daniel: Oh, okay.
Alexandra: Yeah. So, that’s a newer one. When I first started working on this, there was the odd example of LIKE sitting between, say a ‘vah’ or an ‘ah’ and the noun. That is something I cannot produce on my own. I can do it performatively, but I have to think about it. But that’s not what my grammar produces. But my son can absolutely do that and I have recordings with younger speakers and they are definitely doing that.
Daniel: Oh, my gosh, it’s changing again. The kids these days, what are they doing with their language?
Alexandra: They are making it beautiful.
Daniel: They are.
That was me talking to Dr. Alexandra D’Arcy of the University of Victoria and author of Eight hundred years of LIKE. So, you take a sentence like, “The doughnuts were just sitting there on the table.” If we say, “The doughnuts were just sitting there on the like table,” that sounds normal to me.
Kylie: No.
Ben: That doesn’t sound as horrible to me. Maybe it’s because I spend all my time around teenagers though.
Daniel: That is possible because it is coming up in the younger speakers.
Ben: I think in a couple of the other examples, I could envisage LIKE falling in places that I think you guys would label quite aberrant, which to me wouldn’t sound like natural spoken language, but also wouldn’t sound that foreign either.
Daniel: So, maybe we don’t know all have the same feels. Maybe just as language varies-
Ben: It was almost like there’s a significant age difference between me and you, guys. [chuckles].
Daniel: Doesn’t seem possible.
Kylie: But it moved into popular culture. I can remember a number of films like Clueless and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure popping around in the 80s and 90s that have an influence on our language. We still use many of the catchphrases today from Mean Girls, for example.
Daniel: It’s all they have.
Kylie: Yeah, it’s these things moving and the culture becomes normal.
Ben: I’m trying to think of a catchphrase from Bill & Ted’s.
Kylie: 69, dude.
[laughter]
Daniel: 69 is what I thought was thinking of. If I said it, that would have been perfect.
Kylie: [laughs]
Ben: Oh, dear. Well, that was like fascinating.
Daniel: We’re going to like take another part of that interview after this track like.
Ben: Yeah, see, the backend LIKE didn’t work for me.
Daniel: I mean, not Irish.
Ben: Right.
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: This week on Talk the Talk, we are delving into LIKE issues, man.
Daniel: Like, it’s so like-ish.
Ben: We are liking things, not in the Facebook sense. We are talking about the word LIKE and how it gets used in our language, and perhaps, used differently, how it drifts through different bits of a sentence.
Daniel: And there’s no one better to explain this to us then Dr. Alexandra D’Arcy of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada with her forthcoming book, Eight hundred years of LIKE – Discourse pragmatic variation in context. I wanted to ask her about the social aspects of like, because the Roxy quote from our last bit, somebody obviously made that up to make young women seem stupid, and I think that’s a bit of a problem. So, I asked Alex, “Do you get a lot of people peeving on like?”
Alexandra: Oh, I see nothing but that. I am a proud LIKE supporter. Whenever I come out with that, there are always people waiting to jump on me. I come back to again and again the fact that language is constantly changing. LIKE is not new. We think it’s new because we just noticed it. But frankly, that’s an incorrect perception and it’s a naive perception, because the evidence shows us very clearly that it’s been around for a long time. When we do start peeving on LIKE, you’re absolutely right, we point our fingers very squarely, not only at young people, but at girls.
This is problematic from two perspectives. I’m so pleased that you brought this up. First thing, if language is changing, teenagers are always at the front. That’s just the rules. That’s the way it works. That’s the way it has always worked. That is the way it will always work. When we hear younger speakers doing things, I think we should step back when we get upset and remember that we were once teens as well, and that our grandparents were probably not very pleased with us. When we look at rhetoric around language change, the language has been going, and I’m just going to put this bluntly. It’s been going to hell in a handbasket for centuries as far as language peevers are concerned, but we seem to be doing just fine. So, we need to recognize that language change is natural.
The second part of that though is particularly problematic, which is this policing of women’s language, which is misguided and harmful, because it says to women, “You’re doing something wrong and you’re doing it in such a way that you’re harming yourself,” without realizing that there’s nothing that is unique in the English language to women. I’m going to focus on English right now, but this is actually a cross-linguistic observation. We are constantly targeting women because they’re already the target of so many other things. So, it’s easy to pick on women for the way that they speak and it is simply a form of sexism.
Daniel: Gosh, I’m glad to hear you say that because I bash away at this every darn week and I’m glad that I’m not the only one doing this.
Alexandra: Oh, yeah, no, we need to realize that… and here’s the piece. Not only are young people leading language change, it’s actually women who are leading language change. So, if a woman is saying something and you want to get upset at her for it, turn around and high five her, because she’s at the vanguard.
Daniel: That’s it. The other thing is that if you think that young women are the only one saying LIKE, then this is really mistaken, at least I think so. I think that this is something that everybody’s doing, all the young male, female, am I right?
Alexandra: Absolutely. Nobody is privileged in the LIKE camp. Absolutely not. Some of these forms are actually associated probabilistically with men more frequently than with women. So, that LIKE, the focus when that goes inside a sentence, “I was like jumping up and down,” that’s actually more frequent among men than women.
Daniel: Okay. My goodness.
Alexandra: Nobody wants to believe it, but it’s true. We don’t want to believe it, because our ideology says it’s women, it’s women, it’s women. But it’s patently false.
Daniel: Now, if young people are doing something, that could go a couple of ways. It could mean that that’s what everybody’s going to do in the future. It could also mean that young people will lay it aside as they socialize and become mentally adults and adjust their language to live in the adult world that they feel they should be emulating. Do you think this is going to keep going, you think LIKE is going to continue, or do you think that some of these usages will dwindle?
Alexandra: LIKE is not going anywhere.
Daniel: [laughs]
Alexandra: It is here, it has been here for a long time, it will continue to be here. Now, do speakers somewhat attenuate their use of LIKE as they age? My sense is no. What happens instead is that as we have more and more interactional contexts in our lives, we become better and better at adjusting the style of our language for the context that we’re in. When I’m not at work, when I’m not concerned with being Alex, the professor, when I’m Alex, the friend, or Alex, the wife, or Alex, the mom, my ‘likes’ are out, I’m using them, I have no problem with them at all. But when I move into other aspects of my life, other facets of my life, the ‘likes’, many of them do drop in frequency, but it’s because I’m in a different environment, where a different style of language is required. But in terms of my casual speech, LIKE remains completely unaffected.
Daniel: Okay. If there’s somebody who feels insecure about their use of LIKE and they feel they’re kind of beating themselves up a little bit, they’re thinking, “I probably should cut that out sometimes,” what’s the message to them?
Alexandra: The message to them is, don’t be ridiculous. Be kind to yourself. When you are with your friends, when you’re in a safe spot, when the style of your language is not what matters, but rather the content of your interaction where solidarity is foremost, don’t police yourself. Even when language does start to matter, you’re still not going to need to police yourself, because one really important ability that we all have as members of speech communities is that we learn to style shift from context to context. And so, speakers are going to find themselves simply switching very naturally and unconsciously to a style where there are fewer ‘likes’. It’s a skill…
Daniel: Okay.
Alexandra: …but it’s one that we acquire very naturally just by being out there in the world and interacting.
Daniel: Alexandra D’Arcy of the University of Victoria and author of the book, Eight hundred years of LIKE: Discourse Pragmatic Variation in Context.
Ben: That was like pretty cool.
Kylie: [laughs]
Daniel: I like thought so too. Yeah, that sounded weird to me.
Kylie: I’m like finding myself completely censoring everything I say. So, I don’t use LIKE.
Daniel: Are you really on high… [crosstalk
Ben: I’m not at all.
Kylie: No, you seem to naturally do it. I don’t. I think as someone who teaches broadcasting, if I did have a student who used LIKE a lot, I would probably encourage them to script what they’re going to say so they could flow a little better and also encourage them to slow down and be a little less nervous as well to see if they can avoid saying it.
Daniel: Sometimes, if I know what I’m going to say a little bit more, if I’m a little more prepared, then the ‘likes’ disappear.
Kylie: I would say that’s true for my entire radio career. If you were to magically find the Ben Ainslie, who hadn’t been doing radio for the last six or seven years and just click your fingers and make him appear here and now, you would hear a lot more ‘ums’ and ‘likes’ in his everyday speech. I think the thing that I always…
Daniel: Okay. Well, yeah.
Ben: I think the thing that I really enjoy about meeting people is they go, “Oh, you actually sound quite similar to how you sound on the radio.”
Daniel: Oh, that’s interesting.
Ben: I think that’s just because the radio has infected my brain and that’s just the way, I speak in a planned, pensive manner.
Kylie: Whereas I sound like this in normal life. And if you come up to me, [unintelligible [00:29:31].
Daniel: That’s absolutely true, by the way. [crosstalk]
Ben: I will have to politely disagree with Kylie. She is exactly as hyperactive and excitable as she sounds on the track.
Kylie: [unintelligible [00:29:40]
Daniel: I just think it’s interesting how we style switch without even really thinking about it that much. For humans, that’s our linguistic superpower.
Ben: It’s great to hear her reaffirm the tactic that I’ve used with all of my students anyway, which is, “I’m not telling you this is the right way to speak. I’m telling you this is a way to speak. If you want to be a good player of the game of humanity, then you’ll learn how to speak in that way.”
Kylie: That’s the game again.
Daniel: Here is how we speak and here are the effects of how you speak.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: I think that’s totally valid.
Ben: That was really cool. She sounds like a lot of fun. That sounded like it would have been a fun interview to have.
Daniel: We did. We had a great chat. There’s a lot more to that interview. And if you want to hear the whole thing, you can find it on our Patreon page.
Ben: Shall we take a track?
Daniel: Yes, let’s hear one from The Bank Holidays, Like A Piano on RTRFM 92.1.
Ben: Once more, we find ourselves resplendent in the spider silken robes. That is Word of the Week.
Daniel: It’s not political this time.
Ben: I don’t believe you.
Daniel: It’s not… [crosstalk]
Ben: It’s a trap. It’s a trap.
Daniel: No.
Ben: It’s a trap.
Daniel: No, I’m not going there.
Ben: Okay. I have crossed my arms… I’m going to sonorously cross my arms. You ready?
Daniel: Ready.
Ben: That’s me crossing my arms.
Kylie: [laughs]
Daniel: In the way that you, the radio audience, can appreciate. All right, we all know about Uber, right?
Ben: Do you know about Uber, the classic disruptive taxi company?
Daniel: Anybody with a car can be a driver and do gigs when they feel like. Well, somebody recently pointed me to the use of the word, uberization.
Ben: Is this the new word for bringing the on-demand economy to a new thing?
Daniel: Yes, that’s what it means. It doesn’t mean to make your company fall apart by deliberate cheating or general scumminess.
Kylie: [laughs]
Ben: [crosstalk] You know what, I would be really interested to do the research. I feel Uber… There’s this list you can look at of the most-shorted companies on the market and I reckon Uber’s going to be right up there at the moment.
Daniel: Yeah. It has had a rough time lately. The New York Times recently revealed that they’ve been deceiving authorities who are trying to squelch them using a piece of software called Greyball.
Ben: Greyball?
Daniel: Greyball.
Ben: What?
Daniel: The software identifies people who might be authorities trying to catch them and diverts around them.
Ben: Ah.
Kylie: One of the biggest issues I have involves a number of former women employees in the engineering division writing rather lengthy blog posts about what it’s in terms of being employed by Uber.
Ben: I was under the impression that’s Silicon Valley, that it’s a terrible place to have a vagina and a job simultaneously.
Kylie: But it was particularly problematic at Uber according to these women. Yeah, I can post you links on the blog, if you want to read them and they are incredibly sad.
Ben: My issue is, well, that because it’s awful, but also just the fact that in terms of labor rights, it’s a terrible organization. The people who drive for Uber are definitely losing out and then you always hear the catch like, “Yeah, but they don’t have to do if they don’t want to.” It’s like, “No, you’re right.” But anytime you offer desperate people the lowest possible thing that you could offer them, there’s going to be people who take it because we’re really bad at making sure everyone’s okay in the world. And so, they’re just… [crosstalk]
Kylie: Pyramid scheme, for example.
Ben: Yeah. They’re going to drive their car into the ground, they’re going to have no health cover, they’re going to have no support from the app or the organization whatsoever. So, if they get in a prang or anything like that, they’ve just got no people in their back pocket to help them out. It’s not good for drivers.
Daniel: Welcome to the gig economy.
Ben: Right.
Daniel: Uberization. But then, a funny thing happened. While I was looking around on uberization, I started to notice a similar word, uberfication.
Kylie: Oh.
Ben: Oh.
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: Now, because we’ve got the classic gentrification.
Daniel: Okay, we’ve got gentrification.
Ben: I’m assuming that’s where ‘ification’ comes from for this particular word.
Daniel: Well, that’s what people are thinking of. They’re thinking of the ‘fi’ or ‘ify’ suffix, which comes from the Latin word for ‘to do’, which is ‘facere’. In the case of gentrify, you’re taking the gentry and making stuff like that.
Ben: Okay, cool. Interesting. Yeah.
Daniel: Now, which one do you think is the best one, uberfication or uberization?
Ben: I’m going to put my backing on the thing with the more social capital. I think gentrification is a very significant and prevalent issue for a lot of Americans.
Daniel: Well, hang on now, gentrification is only one word that uses the ‘ification’ thing.
Ben: No, I agree. But I think because it’s got all the social capital around it, I think the spillover effects of the ‘ification’ is going to bring Uber… Oh, but actually, it’s bad to say. I just realized, because I tried to say it.
[laughter]
Daniel: Did it give you a weird feel?
Ben: Yeah, Uberification.
Daniel: Well, Uberfication.
Ben: Uberfication. No. Nah, too many consonants.
Kylie: What about the other one? What’s the other one?
Daniel: Uberization.
Ben: Yeah.
Kylie: That is how… [crosstalk]
Daniel: Sounds better. If there’s a theme for this show, it’s this that some things good, but we don’t always know why.
Ben: Doesn’t make you go, [makes groaning sounds]
Daniel: It gives me weird feels.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: This is reflected in the corpus by the way. I’m using the NOW corpus run out of Brigham Young University. Uberization occurs in its various forms more than 600 times in the NOW corpus, whereas Uberfication, only 12.
Ben: Oh, well, I feel like that’s case closed.
Daniel: Well, kind of. Yes. But now, it got me thinking, why does ‘uberize’ sound good and ‘uberfi’ sound so doofy?
Ben: Oh, that’s a good question, because it does.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: That’s a great word for it. It sounds doofy.
Daniel: It does.
Ben: Uberfi.
Daniel: I’m going to give you a little exercise here.
Ben: Is this like Kiki and Uber?
Kylie: [laughs]
Daniel: Well, no. It’s not…
Kylie: Nice try.
Daniel: I’m going to give you a word. You tell me if you would ‘ize’ it or ‘ify’ it, right?
Ben: I feel this is nearly a competition. So, I’m on board.
Daniel: Okay, fine. Capsule?
Ben: Capsulize.
Kylie: Capsify.
Daniel: Yeah. capsulize.
Kylie: Capsulize.
Daniel: Okay, how about this one, Kylie? Cannibal?
Kylie: Cannibalize. Cannibalify. Yeah, cannibalize.
Daniel: Speech?
Ben: Speechify.
Kylie: Speechify.
Daniel: Okay. Random?
Ben and Kylie: Randomize.
Daniel: How about Jazz?
Ben: Jazzify.
Kylie: Jazzisize.
[laughter]
Ben: Because it would be jazzirize. And so, it’s just jazzify.
Daniel: Jazzizacation. Simple, of course?
Ben: Simplify.
Daniel: Calcium?
Ben: Calcify.
Kylie: Calcify.
Daniel: Okay. So, some things sound good, some things don’t. Now, what you do as a linguist is you take all the things that sounded good with ‘ify’ and you put them on one side. All the things that sounded good with ‘ize’, you put on the other side.
Ben: What are the striking similarities there?
Daniel: Okay, well, let’s take a look. The things that sound good with ‘ify’ were things like speech, gentry, jazz, calcium. And the things that sounded good with ‘ize’ were capsule, cannibal, and random. Notice anything about those?
Ben: The second words I notice are all ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum.
Daniel: They’re [unintelligible [00:37:05], aren’t they?
Kylie: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Ah, okay. This is the rule, that ‘ize’ always has an unstressed syllable before it like-
Ben: Random.
Daniel: Random, so that it becomes…
Kylie: Cannibal.
Daniel: …randomize. Can-nibble. That’s got two on said syllable.
Ben: Whereas if you’ve got object, it’s objectify.
Daniel: Right. That’s right.
Ben: If you put the stress on the ending syllable, then you just got to put an ‘ify’ in there.
Daniel: ‘Ify’ always has a stressed syllable in front of it. So, here’s what you do. You take the word, if you need to snap some bits off of it to make it work, go ahead and do that like an E.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: It’s usually an E sound. So, gentry becomes ‘gentr’ and then calcium becomes ‘calc’.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Then, if there’s a stress before the thing, then use ‘ify’ and if not, use ‘ize’.
Ben: Huh.
Daniel: Uber, how would that go?
Ben: U-ber.
Daniel: U-ber.
Ben: You just drop it. It’s an unstressed syllable at the end. So, you go uberize.
Daniel: Uberize.
Kylie: [unintelligible [00:38:01]
Daniel: That is it. If you wanted to clip it, you could just make an ‘ube’ and then ubify would be okay.
Ben: Ubify.
Kylie: Ubify.
Ben: Oh, yeah.
Daniel: I think that might be why some people say uberfy, because that’s close enough to ubify.
Kylie: Should we ubify the economy? There’s an article in Forbes with that on.
Ben: No.
Daniel: Please don’t.
Ben: I’m going to skip right to the end of that bad boy and I’m going to go with nope.
Daniel: A linguist would say that ‘ize’ and ‘ify’ are in a relationship called complementary distribution.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: That means that they are two things that are never seen in the same place, they have their own neighborhoods, and they stick to them.
Ben: The Venn diagram has no intersection bit.
Daniel: There is no bit in the middle. When you see two things in language that they do this, it means they’re different manifestations of the same thing.
Ben: Ah.
Daniel: They’re just handled differently. Isn’t that amazing that we know this, but we don’t know we know? We just have feels.
Ben: Yeah, my feels go to the level of, “Now, is it a stressed syllable or an unstressed syllable at the end? Okay, brain, I think we better dropped the IFY here.”
Daniel: You know a lot of things. There’ll be multiple variants for a new word and then one will dwindle and the other one will go up. I remember this was ‘defriend’ and ‘unfriend’. I think we talked about defriend back in 2010. At the time, defriend and unfriend were parity, but now, nobody says defriend. Everybody says unfriend.
Ben: And so, they should.
Daniel: I think so. Sounds good to my feels.
Ben: Yeah, indeed. My feels agree with your feels.
Daniel: How about your feels, Kylie?
Kylie: Oh, I’m still thinking about jazzify.
Ben: Jazzify.
Kylie: [laughs]
Ben: [jazz music imitation] Shall we take a track to jazzify to?
Daniel: I think we should listen to something a little bit jazzy and-
Ben: Heck yeah.
Daniel: …that will be this track by Leafy Suburbs. This one is Martini Spoke on RTRFM 92.1.
Ben: Daniel and Kylie are here with fingers and, well, eyes ready for your questions and feedback. You can get ahold of us in a bunch of different ways. You can call us on the telephone on 92609210. You can send us an email, talkthetalk@rtrfm.com.au.
Kylie: You can get us on social media. There’s Facebook, our Facebook page for Talk the Talk. Or you can just jump on to Twitter and you can find us @talkrtr or even #rtrfm.
Daniel: Really digging this track from Leafy Suburbs, Martini Spoke on RTRFM 92.1.
Kylie: I’m enjoying it too.
Daniel: Jazzing along here, me and Kylie. Lots of great feedback. Let’s get to it here.
Kylie: Okay.
Daniel: Let’s see, Joe from Midland wanted to talk about language policing. He often sees his dad who lives with a lot of older people. And Joe’s aware that when he is talking to this group, he tries not to use certain words.
Kylie: Oh.
Daniel: For him, it’s conscious, I think. With Alexander, we’re talking about the unconscious aspect of it. We just style shift and we don’t even know that we’re doing it. But he thinks that it’s, for him, more conscious.
Kylie: Yeah. Well, a lot of it is contextual language. The way we talk to our kids might not be the way we talk to grandma, might not be the way we talk to the police officer who pulled us over. So, yeah.
Daniel: Yeah. And he was appreciative of the idea that language evolves. When you’re in a group that’s safe, when you’re with your crew, you just kind of do whatever.
Kylie: Yeah, that’s why a lot of our show gets censored to remove bits and you can check it out. Link’s on our Facebook page, if you want to hear those bits.
Daniel: Alec phoned and native speaker of Spanish, it seems to me, he really hates LIKE.
Kylie: Oh.
Daniel: He says it’s rubbish. It’s rubbish. He refers to a similar thing in Spanish called ‘muleta’, which is the word for crutch, a verbal crutch thing that you do.
Kylie: Yeah.
Daniel: LIKE could be a bit like that I think sometimes, but we usually have a function for it. I asked him if he had any words in Spanish that he could think of that were the same kind of thing and he mentioned ‘pues’, which means well or ‘entonces’, which is ‘then’. You could say… [crosstalk]
Kylie: Well.
Daniel: You wouldn’t say LIKE. You’d say ‘then’. I’ve heard a lot of Spanish speakers say ‘pues’ or even ‘pues entonces’.
Kylie: Fascinating.
Daniel: Getting through some emails here. Mick says, “I use LIKE all over the place and sentences came out of valley speak, late 70s, early 80s California.”
Kylie: Yeah, Frank Zappa. Okay, fine, for sure, for sure.
Daniel: For sure. We can’t forget that track.
Kylie: No.
Daniel: It certainly lifted it into the popular consciousness. That’s for sure. It was still bubbling away. It was still going on for hundreds of years, but that certainly did that.
Kylie: Yeah. It was [unintelligible [00:42:20]. Yeah.
Daniel: Still love that. Really just nailed it socially.
Kylie: Yeah.
Daniel: Mick also asks, “Did ‘love’ used to behave the same way as LIKE?” Hmm, I don’t really think so. Probably not.
Kylie: Oh, I have the magical globe who phoned in and said, is it ‘likify’ or ‘likesize’?
Daniel: Oh, no, that’s interesting. All right, let’s use our rule. If there’s immediate stress before the suffix, then it’s ‘ify’. If not, then it’s ‘ize’. So, what do we say?
Kylie: Like so. There’s a stress, it’s ‘likify’.
Daniel: ‘Likify’.
Kylie: It’s ‘likify’.
Daniel: We likify everything, right?
Kylie: There we go.
Daniel: We don’t like… [crosstalk]
Kylie: I likefied it on Facebook.
Daniel: We don’t likesize things.
Kylie: No.
Daniel: James says, “Pretty sure it was Mary-Kate Olsen or her sister who blew it up worldwide.” Why does no one remember the sister? I think maybe she was saying, “Like you know, like you know,” on talk shows at the height of her popularity. As much as we would love to pin this on one person, I don’t know if we really can.
Kylie: In pop culture, it’s just too diverse. Yeah.
Daniel: Now, Mike says, “I just want to say that in the Justin Bieber bit, it sounds as if LIKE is used as something to say while the person thinks of the next thing to say in the same way as using ‘um’, ‘uh, or sometimes ‘you know’. What do you think?” I put this to Alex in the rest of the discussion that we had. She doesn’t think so. She doesn’t think it serves as an air pocket thing. She thinks it serves as LIKE. You’re focusing the attention on new information.
Kylie: Well, people can probably ask Justin Bieber himself, because he’s wandering around Perth, apparently having a bit of a fun time on his skateboard. So, there you go. If you ever catch him, ask him like, “How he’s going?”
Daniel: What is this?
Kylie: [laughs] He is in town apparently.
Daniel: Oh, he’s cruising around on a skateboard in the Western suburbs?
Kylie: Yeah, why not?
Daniel: [laughs]
Kylie: Go for it, dude. Yeah, come on down to RTRFM. It’ll be awesome times.
Daniel: Yes, indeed. We need to get going here because our time is almost at an end. Be sure to like us on our Facebook page since we’re talking about liking.
Kylie: Yeah, like us. Come on.
Daniel: [crosstalk] Like us.
Kylie: Yeah.
Daniel: You’ll get all kinds of extra goodies and extra stuff that we’re doing. Also, be sure to stay tuned for out to lunch with The Deer and a very eloquent, Mark Neal. He’s got a lot of great stuff coming up for us on the show. Kylie, thanks for hanging out with us.
Kylie: No, thank you.
Daniel: And thanks for all the people who contributed. And until next time, keep talking.
Ben: This has been an RTRFM Podcast. RTRFM is an independent community radio station that relies on listeners for financial support. You can subscribe online at rtrfm.com.au/subscribe.
Kylie: Our theme song is by Ah Trees. And you can check out their music on [unintelligible [00:44:49] and everywhere good music is sold.
Daniel: We’re on Twitter @talkrtr. Send us an email, talkthetalk@rtrfm.com.au. And if you’d like to get lots of extra linguist goodies, then like us on Facebook or check out our Patreon page. You can always find out whatever we’re up to by heading to talkthetalkpodcast.com.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Image credit: http://q.likesuccess.com/114/5673721-justin-bieber-fan-humor.jpg
