I’m Like, Literally?
What is happening to our language?
The study of linguistics shows us that languages are not static but fluid. They naturally evolve to address emerging needs. New words and phrases, and new ways of using established language, arise in response to changing cultural perceptions and social realities.
As with any human activity, the mutability of language is not a simple empirical fact but a reflection of values — cultural choices, political and temperamental tendencies. New linguistic usages are meaningful and significant, because that’s what language essentially is: a tool for signifying physical and ideational realities, for establishing their meaning.
I think we have an intellectual responsibility to evaluate linguistic trends, to ask what they mean in moral and political terms and whether we ought to approve of their meaning. Of course, this sounds like an inherently conservative project, a compulsion to police the use of language to forestall cultural or social change. To be sure, this is a common strategy among conservatives, or among those who temperamentally prefer stability and tradition and fear destabilizing change.
But maybe this conservatism (except in its more extreme expressions) has a point. Maybe anyone concerned about the health of a culture should keep a close watch on its use of language. Sometimes the evolution of linguistic trends does not reflect progress but decline.
George Orwell, surely no conservative, warned us about the potentially destructive mangling of language in his dystopian novel 1984 and in his essays. The English language, he asserted, “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” In another passage he writes, “There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language.”*
Certainly our culture abounds in both foolishness and corruption today, and this is reflected in the “slovenliness” of our political and everyday language. Tweeting and texting have become dominant modes of expression: rushed, careless, abbreviated uses of language that convey nuggets of meaning rather than coherent, contextualized thought. This style has infected our everyday speech and shows up across our writings. It is not just a loss of formality but a crimping of our thought process.
Maybe anyone concerned about the health of a culture should keep a close watch on its use of language.
I am especially bothered by two linguistic trends of our time: the proliferating overuse of the word “like” and the mindless abuse of the word “literally.” To my ears, these are linguistic equivalents of fingernails scratching a chalkboard, and I find myself cringing at their use almost daily. My reaction may be due in part to my getting old and cranky, and even to some latent conservative tendencies, but I am going to argue here that there is also something objectively disturbing about their use.
It is increasingly common to replace precise descriptive phrases such as “I feel that,” “he informed me,” or “she explained that” with the lazy, all-purpose expression “I’m like” or “he/they/she was like.” Instead of saying, “The ranger warned us that there are bears around,” a contemporary speaker says, “The ranger was like, ‘There are bears around.’” To warn conveys contextual meaning: there is danger, and caution is necessary. To be like only suggests that the ranger made some random comment; stripped of context, its meaning is impoverished.
The word “like” has also taken the place of “you know” as a meaningless filler inserted for no reason into our speaking. “I went to the store and bought, like, some new shoes.” Logically, this seems to suggest that the speaker did not actually buy new shoes, but something else, something like them. But this promiscuous use of “like” is not logical or even deliberate; it is an unconscious tic that has infected our language the way deer ticks infect us with Lyme disease. Or maybe, they, like, infect us with, like, Lyme disease. I’m not sure, so I won’t commit to a clear, direct statement.
“You know” was bad enough as a meaningless filler. I used to be shocked listening to professional radio journalists who would pepper their reporting with “you know” in almost every sentence. Surely they, more than the rest of us, should be, you know, conscious of the words coming from their mouths and should, you know, refrain from broadcasting meaningless tics.
But “like” has become even more ubiquitous. Its use is especially noticeable when visible in writing — in transcripts, word-for-word quotations and fictional dialogue. In these formats it is no longer an unconscious quirk of speaking but an obviously meaningless use of language.
“Like” is a device for avoiding precision, for withholding commitment to a position or an idea. Orwell would, I am sure, consider this a “corruption of thought.” We no longer have to aim for accuracy or truth, but only for approximation. Words and things are not fully real, not fully identifiable or contextualized, but are only “like” something. A speaker doesn’t commit to a position or a point of view, but only has to offer a word salad that is “like” something which might be true or real.
I suspect that the widespread mangling of the adverb “literally” goes hand in hand with this slovenliness. Our culture is so unsure of empirical truth, so unwilling to commit to descriptive precision, that we desperately turn to the unneeded modifier “literally” to qualify every statement that we think might really be true. Yesterday I heard someone giving directions say that the destination was “literally” outside the door to the left, as if it wouldn’t be quite believable to simply say that you proceed out the door and look to your left.
This compulsion to add “literally” to our descriptions is diminishing our appreciation for context, imagination and metaphor, drastically narrowing how we understand the world. Literal means that a word or phrase means exactly what it says. It is a signal that language is being used to convey a specific, actual reality in the world. It is the opposite of metaphorical, which signals that language is being used to draw a picture, get at the meaning of something through imagination and comparison. When we say that someone cried their eyes out, we don’t literally mean that their eyeballs protruded from their sockets.
But the distinction between reality and imaginative metaphor is lost when everything is “literal.” The most blatant example of this diminishment I have encountered was a news story a while ago about some radioactive item that had fallen from a truck somewhere in transit. Understandably, officials were very anxious to locate and retrieve it, but the length of the route along which it had disappeared was daunting. One of the searchers stated that they were “literally looking for a needle in a haystack.” Sorry, no. That image is the exact opposite of literal, it is a metaphor. (It is literally a metaphor.) You are literally looking for a radioactive item by the side of the road; you are not actually searching a haystack for a needle.
I think this spreading slovenliness in our language is a symptom of our culture’s increasing uncertainty about what is true or even knowable at all.
A generation of postmodern scholarship has shaken the foundations of traditional belief systems, asserting that they are driven by power relationships and social identity, and do not neatly correspond to an actual, objective reality. A weirdly charismatic political leader with a hypnotic hold on half the population has saturated our public discourse with a shameless torrent of blatant lies and dark conspiracy theories. Technology has inserted a disorienting electronic barrier between our lived experience and “virtual” realities, online “friends,” fake news and images and completely siloed echo chambers. And now we have to contend with artificial intelligence.
Even more fundamentally, the epistemological foundations of modern culture are crumbling before our eyes. For more than two centuries, the Enlightenment’s embrace of reason and scientific method provided a confident faith in progress, democracy, social harmony and human flourishing generally. It would have been completely absurd for the Founding Fathers to proclaim “We literally hold these truths to be, like, self-evident…” because they believed in the words they used in a way we can no longer emulate.
For generations, modern people believed that we could know the world thoroughly and through that knowledge, master it. We trusted the expertise of scientists, doctors and engineers to make our lives better. But that belief and trust, along with Enlightenment faith in reason itself, have been shattered by the last hundred years of barbaric warfare, environmental destruction, and the overwhelming, disorienting complexity of modern life. We have lost our confidence that we can actually know, let alone master, the world.
So of course our language will reflect this uncertainty, this sense of wandering forlornly in a confusing, alien and sinister world. We feel detached from reality, and so things are “like” real but not exactly. We want to hold on to some scrap of truth and so we desperately insist that things or ideas are “literally” what they are and not political disinformation, digital manipulations or ephemeral products of social construction.
I realize now that I am irritated by these linguistic tics not only because they seem lazy and nonsensical, but because they accurately reflect the spiraling decline of our civilization. They are canaries in a coal mine. I mean that metaphorically.
* Admittedly, I found these passages on a quotation-compiling website, azquotes.com, which cited a collection of Orwell’s essays, All Art is Propaganda, curated by George Packer (Mariner Books, 2009). If I were writing for an academic (or any traditional paper form of) publication I would check this out for myself, but in this online format I am allowing myself to be more careless. It’s true: the medium (or in this case, the Medium) is the message, so you should take the accuracy of these quotations with a grain of salt (that’s a metaphor, by the way, not literal) because they were found online; I have no idea how credible the tenders of that website are. I do know that George Packer, one of the best journalists of our time, is credible.
