Why Everyone Says 'Like' So Much

Why do people say "like" so much? It isn't lazy filler. Linguists found it does five real jobs, and it's centuries older than the Valley Girls. It starts over coffee, with a friend counting your "likes" on his fingers and then saying what everybody says: young people are ruining English. So the video goes looking for where the word really came from: Frank Zappa's "Valley Girl" in 1982, a beatnik on American TV in 1959, Shaggy on Saturday-morning cartoons, and the linguist Alexandra D'Arcy, who found it in novels and in the transcripts of British criminal trials from the 1700s. Then it takes on the other complaint, that "like" means nothing. It turns out to have at least five jobs, from quoting a face instead of words to softening a request, and it follows rules about where it can go in a sentence. With the Toronto study that recorded everyone from teenagers to eighty-year-olds, and a 2014 count of hundreds of everyday conversations that found something odd about who says it most. And it asks the question the friend never does: if young people started it, which young people? Along the way: Jonathan Swift's 1710 fight against two new words, the same little word turning up in other languages, and what saying it does to the way people judge you. 0:00 Counting the Likes 0:48 Blame the Valley Girls? 1:59 Back to the 1700s 2:55 Five Jobs in Four Letters 7:01 Who Really Started It 7:32 Every Generation Complains 8:41 Should You Say It? General information, not medical or professional advice. Same guy, other channels: Make It Out Animation (@MakeItOutAnimation) · It's On Purpose (@ItsOnPurposeAnimation) #Preinstalled #Psychology #HumanBody