Keep It Fresh

Last time I mentioned Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter in these pages, it was to roll my eyes at his take on the ubiquitous conversational “like.” In his New York Times column on language, he suggested that far from being merely a form of wishy-washy hedging, it’s actually a sign of “people attuned to one another,” used by a speaker to anticipate mistaken thinking on the part of his interlocutor.

So, for example, if someone says, “We looked in, and it was so crowded. And not just a few kids. There were, like, grandparents and cousins in there. We had to go somewhere else,” the function of “like,” per McWhorter, is “to imply, ‘You might think it was just some kids, but actually…’ ”

In a more recent column, he took another crack at “like,” quoting University of Victoria professor Alexandra D’Arcy for the idea that if “someone tells of someone else unexpectedly showing up and says, ‘It was, like, him!’ — it functions as a shorthand way of indicating a proposition: Pull your mental camera back and imagine the scene: I’m doing my thing, suddenly the doorbell rings, I open the door, and of all people, it’s him!”

For D’Arcy — who wrote a book reviewing no fewer than 800 years of “like” — using the word to guide “your listener to share your sense of surprise is a way of soliciting closeness. You step outside of your mind and invite your comrades in.” In other words, it’s all about sensitivity and fellowship and achdus, you see. Why, before you know it, to paraphrase Country Yossi, it’s gonna be the little vertelach like “like,” that make Mashiach come.