This will try to be an unbiased observation. But, full disclosure, I hate like.
Nothing against the word itself… to approve of something, to like it, as facebook offers us. I have no problem with that. (Well, the facebook ‘like’ does discourage conversation and make things superficial, but that is what facebook does…but that’s another article.)
No, what I’m talking about is what conversations have become, we no longer “feel” or “say”, instead we “were like”.
It works for anything…
The “like” will work. My friend says he wrecked his car. I was like, What happened?
Your friend has free tickets to the U2 concert and invites me.
I was like, Awesome.
Or it could be a response to a simple statement:
“I’m going to go get some Chinese food.”
I was like, I’ll go.
The origin of this phrase goes back to the Valley Girl speak most of us made fun of back in the 80s-90s. But over time, it has crept into everyday use. And when I hear a conversation of likes strung out together like rusty barbed wire, snagging at the flow of the conversation, it makes me, like, sick.
Maybe it’s a better way of filling space, like the uh, or um… but that’s debatable.
Maybe it’s a way of distancing our self away from our feelings. Instead of saying I think, I feel, we interject a like, so those feelings are easier to talk about at a distance.
And if you are “like” something, you don’t need to be exact. If someone says that didn’t happen, or that they didn’t say that, you can counter, “I never said you invited me home with you. I just said, you were LIKE that.”
Or maybe it’s just a saying that enough people use that it bothers me to write a blog about it.