The word like is a wicked weed that has killed the flowers of language in the speech and communication garden of life. "Like" is an infestation killing off meaning in every spoken human contact, and no spray or bomb of intelligence is strong enough to wipe it out.
Sure, the dated 1983 movie, Valley Girl, satire of the idiotic vocabulary and tone which introduced us to like and all that comes with "like-ism," might have been a lark at the time. A stupid lark, but good for a mindless chucklet.
It may be that the Valley Girl popularity from the 1980s introduced the ultimate speech tick for all those who get excited by living in distraction and not reality. Using the word, like every three or four seconds has become not "like" an epidemic in everyday speech; it is a five-star epidemic distraction from making any point at all. (Note: I'm trying to use as many numbers as I can to effectively and authoritatively illustrate my No. 1 point.)
Those of us cursed with having audio-enhanced ears and a love for real communication, can't help but recognize the inescapable preponderance of chirping "like" droppings in conversations in a "duh" kind of way. Like is everywhere. And not as in, "I like you in an outside of Facebook way."
Neither am I referring to the infamous Facebook "like," although who cares about what comments, products, hashtags most people like? Unless you are selling something, as in, yourself. That's another subject.
I'm talking here about using the word, like, every few seconds to water down anything real that might accidentally slip from the tongue and dare to reveal a true thought or feeling. Like, the perfect out of saying anything meaningful.
Think about it. What does injecting "like" into a sentence consistently end up meaning? The meaning is that there is nothing being said. The insertion of "like" is a reference to an invisible comparison, as in "like this or that."
It eliminates anything that follows it. As in, "It was, like, he was so clueless." Was he clueless or was he like clueless but not clueless at all? What follows the use of "like" is nothingness. As in, you are saying nothing! And OMG, there is so much nothing being said. No commitment is the key to sprinkling "like" on the salad of talk.
Is that the point, making no commitment in communication, or is it an unconscious by-product? I wonder if commitment is being wiped out because it is preferable to not commit out loud to a thought! If so, whoops. There goes truth and human connection.
To put it simply, phrases like "sort of" or "kind of," which seem to precede as a softener to any conclusive point in conversation, as well as the above-mentioned "like," illustrate just how far away we have come from human connection, replaced with a robotic language that disappears the telling of truth. "Got it"? "I get it," "let's grab lunch," and "there you go" I'll save for next time. In robot talk, "Wait for it."