Why do kids say 'like' all the time?

Like, I sort a like, like, when I like, y’know, like….er like….

We’ve all been there, but what is the fascination with the simile in young people in the UK.  The refrain of a youth trying desperately to search their mind for the words, the order of words that will get the teacher off their back and the difficult question passed to another more deserving soul. They will stutter and start like an outboard motor missing care and attention, searching for a noun to throw into their sentence to make some sort of meaning. But why?

Is it simply they have no confidence in their words anymore? Do people search for metaphor and simile because they are afraid to be direct? Direct is aggressive, angry, to the point. It marks you out and more and more our young people want to be pack animals. Pity the tall poppy cut down in its prime. No one wants to stand out because we just don’t reward it anymore.

Is it a cultural throwback? Are we just being bounced around by the echo of the Television and film writers brought up in the late 60s USA; infected with surferisms they have ‘duded’ and ‘so wilded’ and ‘manned’ their way into our subconscious. ‘Like, groovy man?’ Possibly not

Are they just using a catch-all word to think? Is it the twenty first century screen saver. Should we just imagine a little sign above their head that reads – buffering –

Maybe I’m being mean – perhaps we are just reaping the storybook society we live in. We are all the hero in our own little soap opera. Do we need to compare what we see to something else because our lives are filled with metaphor? We are like angels when young, like demons when adolescent and when struggling through school we hear again and again – ‘Cooper! It’s like you just don’t care’. Perhaps it is our fault. We are no longer direct with our words and we fall back on the metaphor and comparisons that make us feel that we haven’t hung an idea out there in the wind, that we have a basis for our thought. We want to base our words on words that have come before and so ‘like’ is simply a connection to our collective past.

For me, I believe (it’s like) we’re just not brave enough to say what we think anymore.

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