(Don't) "Like"

After discovering the Oxford University Press blog yesterday, I explored a little further today, and found an essay on the history of the filler-word "like," which is one of my pet peeves.  I had assumed it was a recent innovation.  It is not.

The ubiquitous modern parasite like can perhaps be traced to early usage, but the causes of its unhealthy popularity in today’s American English remain a mystery...

Of some interest is the fact that the adverb belike once existed and may still exist, at least in dialects.  Consider the following: “All these three, belike, went together” (1741; OED).  Take away be-, and you will get a charming modern sentence: “All these three, like, went together.”  Belike meant “in all likelihood.”

My hypothesis is that at a certain moment like freed itself from the verb to be and became an independent filler.  It has been used in British dialects as it is used in American English for quite some time and was probably brought to the New World, where it stayed “underground” until approximately forty or fifty years ago...

It need not even be called an adverb, for it is a parenthetical word and should be flanked by commas (as is done in most modern editions that contain samples of such usage).  But the part of speech called adverb has always served as a trashcan for grammatical misfits...

Nowadays linguists are not supposed to be judgmental... They should describe language with equanimity and detachment, as a geologist describes rocks or, even better, as a prosector dissects corpses.  But language, in addition to being a means of communication, is an object of culture, a garden in which flowers coexist with weeds, and I wince when I hear: “She may, like, come later” and “Did she, like, attend college?”  To be sure, the egalitarian motto—be descriptive, not prescriptive—is a hoax, for teachers and editors exist (are even paid) for instilling certain values into students and authors.  So I describe like and condemn it...

There is a branch of linguistics called pragmatics.  It deals with the ways people organize their speech; the use of like belongs to it.  Whatever the source of the filler, it seems to function (or to have functioned at one time) as a marker of uncertainty and resembles as it were, a common parasite in British English...

Particularly disconcerting is the fact that the analogs of like swamped other languages at roughly the same time or a few decades later.  Germans have begun to say quasi in every sentence.  Swedes say liksom, and Russians say kak by; both mean “as though.”

More at the link.  And note that there is a LOT of interesting stuff in that blog's archives that will appeal to TYWKIWDBI readers).