Young Women are Changing Speech Stigma in the Workplace
Saying “like” is becoming an increasingly accepted part of professional speech.
You have an important interview. You’ve dressed up, because you know how much the first impression matters. When you sit down in front of your maybe-future boss, heart racing from the nerves, they break the ice. Then, in your very first sentence — you drop the L-word.
You said “like” in the middle of a sentence.
This means you’re probably a college-aged woman, according to research. They invented the L-word, and they’re still the most avid users.
Young women are on the forefronts of linguistic change. They develop new ways of speaking that eventually is adopted by the broader population. Australian researcher Martin Schweinberger describes the early creation of new speech patterns this way: “gender differentiation sets in, with females taking the lead in the majority of cases while males commonly fail to adopt the new feature. After about one generation….the youngest male group begins adopting the incoming feature.” As a young woman myself who tends to use the L-word quite a bit, I think it’s kind of cool that we’re the trendsetters. However, not everyone appreciates our linguistic creativity.
Lots of career and business experts say you should nix this little word from your vocabulary because it makes you sound dumb. There’s even an app that tries to help you expunge the word from daily conversation. Journalist Edwin Newman in his book, Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English?, dismissed the L-word as meaningless and a symptom of careless speech all the way back in 1974, so the disapproving opinions aren’t new. The scolds wrap up this linguistic marker into a package — “valley girl speak” — along with uptalk and vocal fry, advising young women and everyone else to remold their speech habits.
But in my professional life, I’ve started to notice something interesting. As older bosses age out of the workforce to be replaced by younger professionals, increasingly women, I think the L-word is becoming more accepted at work, helping the stigma of stupidity to fall away. It may actually be flipping on its head.
Changing attitudes
One of the linguistic uses of the L-word is to build camaraderie. When you say it to someone else who uses it, you’re conveying a powerful social signal — we speak alike, therefore we are alike. This means that if you have a job interview with someone who says the L-word, from a purely logical perspective it may be a good idea for you to use it, too. This technique is known as mirroring, and it is a powerful way to build rapport.
In fact, if you don’t use the L-word enough, it may be more difficult for the interviewer to connect with you. Not saying the word enough can sterilize your speech, making you sound stiff and robotic — overly composed and inauthentic. This is exactly the opposite of what employers are looking for.
There is a rising number of young bosses in the workplace, which may be changing popular opinion of the L-word in the business world. Many are women, who have obtained the majority of the over 4.5 million new management jobs created since 1980, according to Harvard Business Review. Millennials, who are in their late 20s and early 30s, now make up the largest percentage of the labor force, according to Pew Research. Over 20 million Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) have left the workforce in the last 10 years, and the population of working Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980) has stabilized, giving younger generations sway over today’s business culture.
Besides social utility, the L-word also has other linguistic benefits.
One way to use the L-word during speech is as a discourse marker. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, we use markers “to connect, organize and manage what we say or write or to express attitude.” Using a discourse marker has more purpose and use than just filling space in a conversation. As a discourse marker, the word also conveys the social meaning that could drive its own acceptance. Another popular use is for storytelling, replacing quotation marks with the L-word. Unlike quotations, the L-word is an approximation, so it’s not used to quote verbatim, which gives the storyteller flexibility of expression.
It’s so flexible that it can actually fit seven grammar categories: verbs, prepositions, nouns, adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions. It’s hard to avoid using it, and people aren’t. They’re using it more than ever.
Cultural acceptance
Though some people may deride your use of the L-word, remember that it’s not useless. The detractors are also shrinking, becoming outnumbered by younger generations and older generations adopting the L-word.
I realized it’s widely used when I started looking for it. I’ve heard the little word escape the lips of men of all ages and older women in the office. Though young women are still the primary users, in my experience, it seems to be by a pretty small margin.
There have been decades of diffusion across populations, and the more people who use it the more accepted it becomes. We all know it’s been around for a while, but it’s especially immortalized in the 1983 hit movie, Valley Girl. Some say it saw broad popularity in the ’90s, giving us about 30 years to get used to it.
To foster social inclusion everyone is adopting the L-word today — even my middle-aged dad. I think this is thanks to young professionals in today’s workforce, showing everyone that you can say it while being, like, incredibly smart.
