[Edling] Why do people, like, say, ‘like’ so much?

[karen stanley via Edling]

 Just a side comment: At one point, when I was much (MUCH!!!) younger, the (a?) popular filler was, "you know." When I said it, my mother would say, "No, I don't know." So I just stopped talking every time she did it and walked away.

Karen Stanley


On Thursday, May 19, 2022, 05:52:06 PM EDT, Francis M. Hult via Edling <edling at lists.mail.umbc.edu> wrote:


The Guardian

Why do people, like, say, ‘like’ so much?

When Michael Gove was education secretary in 2014, he used an update to the national curriculum to require students to speak in “standard English”, even in informal settings, in all British schools. This reinforced the idea that there was only one right way to speak English. By 2019, one primary school head in Bradford, Christabel Shepherd, said she banned the word because, “When children are giving you an answer and they say, ‘Is it, like, when you’re, like…’ they haven’t actually made a sentence at all. They use the word all the time and we are trying to get rid of it.” Nick Gibb, then schools minister, praised the decision and said others should follow suit...

Carmen Fought, professor of linguistics at Pitzer College...adds that although the debate around “like” can be fun, when it comes to teachers punishing children for saying the word there are more serious impacts. “There’s nothing more non-conducive to learning and contrary to the purpose of education than constantly shutting kids down because of how they talk. If you want to teach a kid to practise having different language styles, that’s fine. But to demean and criticise the way someone speaks in any situation is very, very harmful.”

Full story:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/may/15/why-do-people-like-say-like-so-much-in-praise-of-an-underappreciated-word


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