Why do we say “like,” like, all the time?

But then again, she said, few could have predicted the endurance of the slang word “cool” as a marker for all things generally good or fashionable. Researchers say it emerged nearly a century ago in the 1930s jazz scene, retreated from time to time over the decades, but kept coming back.

it would have seemed both natural and literate. The old rule is simple: Don’t use “like” in any case where “as if” or “as though” would fit comfortably.

When writers use “say” or “ask,” it isn’t to get readers to register the fact that something is said or asked—the dialogue already makes this obvious. I believe this advice to be useful and true. I also know that it is cultural. We read “say” and “ask” as invisible terms not, of course, because they are invisible, and not because of their meaning—“

People don’t seem to care or even notice when men talk this way. Only when it comes from female mouths does it cause such an upset. This fact makes it clear that our culture’s aversion to vocal fry, uptalk, and like isn’t really about the speech qualities themselves.

At first glance, this kind of repurposing might seem like a purely internet invention, and it is, insofar as people weren’t peppering their speech with code snippets or hashtags before we had any such thing. But English has a long history of verbalizing punctuation: think of “that’s the facts, period” or “these quote-unquote experts.”