"Like" abuse redivivus

[Benjamin Lukoff]

On Sun, 13 Apr 2008 RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:

> In hindsight, I believe it seemed understandable to me as an
> extention/contraction of "(What) he (said was something like), Q"--which is, after all, what
> it meant (at least then). There were other such quotatives going around then as
> well, at least one of which I reported in the early 1980s in AS: "BE all," as
> in "And he was all, 'Q'."

I once tried conducting an informal survey of my friends as to whether
they saw any difference between "And he was all, 'Q'" and "And he was,
like, 'Q'". I got absolutely nowhere. *Is* there a difference in meaning
here?

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