Talking About Words: Like, Wow!

By Richard Bailey

The people who used to say "Hey, Man, like groovy" are now receiving Social Security benefits.

Groovy spread out from referring, approvingly, to certain kinds of music into broader use in 1960. A book with an evocative title, The Beat Generation, reported of an attractive woman, "She was groovy."

For a while, groovy flowed, but then it ebbed. An observation made in 1992 on the CBS program This Morning captured the muddy tidal flat where groovy was gasping for air: "I don't like when my mother uses words from the '60s like groovy and neato and stuff. It's so embarrassing."

Groovy is now dead, or on life support. Only when Simon and Garfunkel appear in revivals does the lilting melody of the "59th Street Bridge" song bring tears to the eyes of the elderly: "Life I love you; all is groovy." (Of course they can buy "Groovy Girls" for their granddaughters. But they are s-o-o-o retro.)

The Forrest Gump in my example, however, is not hey or man or groovy. It's like like.

Like used to mean, among other things, something like almost: leather-like upholstery was a seat cover that looked a lot like leather but wasn't. He was like OK was a tepid endorsement—akin to the old-fashioned pert near, so-so or maybe a few bricks shy of a load.

The new like introduces speech or some other sort of communicative expression. The linguists call this one quotative.

It substitutes for older verbs like say:

Then: She said, "Hello."

Now: She's like, "Hi."

Soon it spread into new expressive territory.

"So when my Mom walked in, I'm like…" (covers face with both hands)

"You look at him, and it's, like…" ( the speaker forms the letter ell over her forehead—which is to say loser !")

The first documented use of this quotative like—how more appropriate could this be?—is from Moon Unit Zappa's 1982 babbling lyric to "Valley Girl": "She's like 'Oh my God.'"

It didn't take long for this attractive novelty to be swept up by the mainstream. Here's a line from a 1996 advertisement for AT&T: "I'm like, 'This is hard work.'"

At Michigan, there's a huge file of academic English—MICASE—to help people learning English discover how we actually talk here. For purists, these transcripts are discomforting, but if you arrive on campus with nothing but the "proper" English from your textbook back home, you're going to be in trouble when you begin to hear people talk.

How can a young person from China, well-schooled in English, figure out what Michigan students are saying in conversations like these?

"I said, you know, can I ask you a few questions, and she's, like, no. I was, like, okay, well. Um, she says you, you know, you have to get permission from the mall manager…"

[ LAUGH ] "But yeah, I was like, she was like, what's it from? I'm like, this class, I'm like, this is jus—this, she's like, oh really? I was, like, yeah, I cannot just sit the—I mean I, I had knee problems…"

Like it or not, this is how students talk—and some older people, too.

It's like, wow!

Richard W. Bailey is the Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English. His most recent book is Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff, University of Michigan Press, 2003—a biography of an American thief, impostor, murderer and would-be philologist who lived from 1821 to1871. It was published by the University of Michigan Press in August.

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