The Tyranny of “Like”.

There was a time when a pause meant a person was thinking. Now a pause is treated almost as a social failure, something to be patched immediately with verbal putty: like, okay, you know, sort of, basically. Speech must never appear unfinished, even when thought plainly is.

Among these fillers, like has become sovereign. It appears before nouns, after verbs, inside clauses, before conclusions, after conclusions, and often where no grammatical need exists at all. A sentence that once moved directly from thought to meaning now advances in hesitant instalments, before arriving anywhere.

Linguists, naturally, are forgiving. They explain that like has history, function, ancestry. It softens assertions, marks approximation, introduces quotation, buys time while thought catches up. All true. The word has respectable credentials. It did not begin with Californian teenagers. It did not arrive yesterday. The defence is always that like serves a purpose. It softens, hedges, approximates, buys time. So does coughing, but one would not willingly build a sentence out of it.

But history does not excuse inflation. What began as occasional conversational scaffolding has become habitual verbal dependency. In excess, like does not merely soften speech; it weakens it. Every second phrase arrives wrapped in hesitation, as though certainty itself has become faintly embarrassing.

The old Valley Girl caricature at least had comic self-awareness. What is striking now is how fully the habit has escaped parody. It appears in interviews, classrooms, meetings, podcasts, public commentary, even among those attempting to sound authoritative while steadily dismantling their own authority syllable by syllable.

Its close cousin is OK, a word now deployed so frequently that entire conversations seem held together by its managerial reassurance. OK no longer means agreement; often it means little more than verbal throat-clearing. OK, so... OK, right... OK, but... Speech increasingly begins not with meaning but with permission to proceed.

Neither word is the true offence. The common feature is distrust of silence.

Silence once signalled that thought was assembling itself. Now silence appears intolerable, a gap to be sealed instantly lest the speaker seem uncertain, unprepared, or worse, alone with their own mind. This may explain why so much contemporary speech sounds busy while saying remarkably little. The sentence keeps moving, partly to avoid the risk that stillness might reveal whether anything definite was waiting behind it. Teachers notice it. Lecturers notice it. Anyone listening to a twenty-minute presentation notices it: words arrive rapidly, but often in provisional clusters, padded against stillness. The irony is that this style presents itself as casual authenticity while often concealing extreme linguistic caution. Nothing must land too hard. Nothing must sound too final. Every statement carries an escape hatch. Perhaps that is why like survives so successfully. It allows speech to remain permanently negotiable. To speak plainly now can sound almost abrupt.

Plain speech still carries an old power: a sentence that trusts itself enough not to apologise before reaching its verb.

A pause helps too...

...one need not fill every inch of air.

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The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.