I went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Saturday, March 29, 2025, one day after purchasing a new membership (I referenced this in the Newsletter I mailed that evening). My walk to the Garden took me through Grand Army Plaza, which was turned into a zoo by a throng of poorly dressed, often poorly behaved people. Two women (reasonably dressed) were walking ahead of me. One was talking at a rapid-fire pace. Regular readers will know that I sometimes turn things I overhear on the street – whether they are painful, bro comedy, insightful, educational, or humorous – into articles (things overheard have also informed my dialogues). The last thing I overheard before passing the pair fell cleanly into the painful category.
But I’m like uh like literally like.
Woman near Prospect Park
My first article about things I overheard on the street tackled like as a verbal tic, specifically the increasing tendency of people to say like every third or fourth word while employing it interchangeably as various parts of speech. I thought of one sentence in particular from that article:
It will not be easy to turn the tide against ‘like,’ or its unfortunate close second cousin, ‘literally.’
Nicholas A. Ferrell
Literally is oft-abused, but not as oft-used and abused as like. But it is common enough for me to have noted it back in my 2020 article about like and for me to have used an awful literally quote as inspiration to tackle social media marketing jargon. There are more people who abuse like than literally, and I suspect few who abuse literally but not like.
Lest one thinks that my critique of the over-use like and literally is nit-picky, I present the quote I overheard at the foot of Prospect Park as an example of why the problem is real. The woman strung together seven words (or six if you want to be charitable and excise uh) and managed to say nothing of substance (or literally nothing of substance). Three of the six or seven words are the word like. It is unclear whether like is supposed to mean akin to or uh. Things appear to have gone off the track before we get to literally like at the end. I fear that some people who suffer from the like affliction are under the misapprehension that flogging the word literally restores substantive solidity to a thought evaporating in a haze of likes.
(Aside: I submit that while like is often used as a substitute for uh, like is demonstrably worse than uh because it is a word with an actual meaning, not primarily a noise one makes while gathering his or her thoughts. This has a natural tendency to introduce ambiguities into a sentence. This tendency is less often the case with uh and its guttural relatives.)
Clear writing flows from clear thinking. So too, I suppose, does clear speaking. Whence does “but I’m like uh literally like” flow? The best we can hope is that there is some sort of dam between the sparking river of thoughts and the speaker’s mouth. But what happens when one hears him or herself (I recall the like abuse once primarily affecting girls and women, but I have noticed of late that the overuse/misuse of like is becoming increasingly egalitarian in choosing its victims) articulate his or her thoughts through a torrent of likes and literallies? What happens when one hears others responding in the same manner – especially at formative ages? The concern is that the process of formulating a thought and conveying that thought through clear speech may not be mono-directional. Can we say with confidence that unclear speaking does not affect one’s thinking? What begins as a struggle to be verbally articulate for one of many possible reasons (nervousness, having grown up being bludgeoned with likes and literallies, etc.) may also affect one’s internal speech patterns and reasoning, much like how audio-visual media can affect one’s approach to writing.
I fear that there is no grand societal solution for tempering the like/literally problem, especially because I suspect that many parents and teachers are afflicted, as clearly are the so-called creators and influences who populate social media. But we can all lead by example in trying to speak with due deliberate precision. We can when in doubt pause and take a moment to gather our thoughts. Thoughts are more likely to run away while someone is trying to overcome his or her need to breathe while trying to control a conversation (or literally gasping for air like excited children have a tendency to do when trying to power-through) than it is during that brief moment one takes to ascertain what he or she wants to say and structures how he or she should say it. A brief pause in a conversation is nothing to fear (nor is it an invitation to turn to a screen). The goal is not eloquence in the abstract, but the economical eloquence found in clear sentences formed pursuant to clear thoughts. I will add that this focus is also valuable for those who are not afflicted with postmodern (or post-apocalyptic) verbal tics such as like, literally, and like literally, for there are other tics, including those of the classic guttural variety, and other ways to be insipid or unclear without being readily quotable. When one attends to his or her own speech, he or she may directly or indirectly inspire others to attend to their speech. If people can absorb like, literally, and like literally from the aether, I would like to think that they can also absorb clear speaking (including limiting their use of like and literally to cases when those words enhance, rather than obfuscate, what they mean to say).
