Walk into any hip startup and what’s the one word you’ll hear echoing across the cubicles and over the Keurig despite best efforts to rein in its use? No, it doesn’t rhyme with luck or hit. This one rhymes with hike and should be wildly familiar to anyone who’s seen the movies Valley Girl or Clueless. Like may sound juvenile, but it has taken over our linguistic nooks and crannies in almost every variety of global English. It appears at the beginning of sentences, in the middle of clauses, and now it even introduces quotes. This expanded use of like is so widespread that news outlets ranging from The Atlantic to Time to Vanity Fair to The New York Times have covered what seems to be its troubling and meteoric rise.
But before condemning like as a blight on all that we hold professionally dear, let’s take some time to consider why it might actually serve the greater communicative good. Just maybe, there is more to like than we might at first believe.
Even when it’s “appropriately” used, it’s a syntactical workhorse. Primarily, we hear as a verb, to discuss a fondness for objects or people (“I like ice cream”). As a noun, we have preferences (likes) and their opposite (dislikes). As an adjective, the word is infinitely applicable (swanlike, buffoonlike) to mean “similar to” or “in the manner of.” used as a preposition, as found in a simile construction (“She has eyes like the sky”) and as a conjunction to embed another clause (“She rode the bike like she was on fire”).
