Conversational Fillers

“I’ll be leaving in, like, half an hour,” said my grandson. 

I refrained from responding, “When, exactly, will you be leaving?” as I might have done, a generation ago, pedantic parent that I was.

In my generation, “you know” had become the common interruptor. What once was a parenthetical phrase to emphasize a point, or invite the listener to agree, had become a filler for an awkward pause, or even, in extreme cases, a tic, of which the speaker was completely unaware. Sometimes, one could, you know, count a dozen or so, you know, tics in a paragraph. But at least in the beginning, “you know” made some sense, either as a statement or a question.

Not so the ubiquitous “like”, which has now replaced “you know” as a conversational tic, particularly among younger people. And yet, consciously or unconsciously on the part of the speaker, “like” may be performing a grammatical function. In an article in Time (May 21, 2014) entitled “Here’s What to Say to That Jerk Who Corrects Your Grammar”, Katy Steinmetz quotes from the book Bad English by Ammon Shea.

Shea explains that while "like" may be  staple of the Valley Girl caricature, the word is actually performing useful linguistic duties:

• In the sentence “She was like, ‘Get out of my face,” the word signals the beginning of a quote and is known as a quotatative compartmentalizer.
• In the sentence “It’s going to take me like forever to get there,” it functions as an approximative adverb, signaling how strongly to interpret the following word; "almost" and "barely" play similar roles.
• In the sentences “I stole a panda. Like, I couldn’t live without him,” "like" is a discourse marker, a word used at the beginning of a sentence indicating that a clarification of what has just been said will now be given; one might similarly use "I mean" to introduce more information.

Quotatative compartmentalizer, approximative adverb, or discourse marker.

Was my grandson using “like” as an approximative adverb, or was he exhibiting a verbal tic?

The redundant “like” was around long before the Valley Girls. I first encountered it in the north of England in the sixties, when a Yorkshireman or Lancastrian might say “Where are you going today, like?” Or, “There was once a coal mine over there, like.”

This usage would perhaps fall into the third of Shea’s categories, a variation of the discourse marker, a kind of emphasis at the end rather than the beginning of the sentence, meaning, “I’m asking you,” or “I’m telling you.”

And as for the quotatative compartmentalizer, here are a few snippets from the reaction of some rural Australians who thought the world was coming to an end when they witnessed an eerie glow in the sky rising from a marijuana factory. From one speaker:

"But in my head I'm like, what the hell is that?"

"Mum's on the phone and Dad's in the background going: 'I better hurry up and eat my tea because the world's ending.'"

"And Mum's like: 'What's the point of eating your tea if the world's ending?’”

And another:

"I was having a big Stranger Things moment - I'm like, Vecna? Is that you?" she said, referencing a villain from the TV series. 

To read the full story on the BBC and see the eerie glow, visit https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-62261094