When talking with friends, Pitt senior Stephanie Hacke tends to use the words “like” and “totally” so often that some of her friends have, like, totally teased her about it.
“I don’t know why I do that, but I’m not the only one. I hear a lot of people my age saying ‘like’ all the time,” says Hacke, who is double majoring in communication and English, and who interned with KDKA-TV News last term. “The thing I always try to remember is that I need to speak one way with friends and another, more professional way at work. You’ll come off as sounding immature if you say ‘like’ all the time in a professional situation.”
Unfortunately, not all young people entering the job market realize that, says Jennifer Cwiklinski, a career counselor in Pitt’s Office of Career Services.
When conducting mock job interviews with Pitt students and alumni, one of the services her office provides, Cwiklinkski hears an awful lot of unnecessary “likes,” she says.
“When people are interviewing for a job, they’re nervous. It’s not a natural situation for them, and they sometimes fall back on comfort habits such as using slang and saying ‘like’ repeatedly,” Cwiklinsky points out. “But it’s not a good habit, because it makes them sound like kids, not adults and potential professionals.”
“Like” serves several conversational functions, notes Scott F. Kiesling, an assistant professor in Pitt’s Department of Linguistics. According to Kiesling, “like” can:
• Take the place of “said” (“I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’”);
• Serve the same role as “um” in filling a pause in conversation (“When are you…like…going to answer my question?”);
• Signal that the speaker is being friendly and informal; and
• Indicate that the speaker is using approximate terms (“She’s, like, a professor”—meaning, the woman in question may not literally hold the title of professor, but she is a faculty member with professorial job duties).
Yet another usage, now passé, dates back to the 1950s, although its authenticity is dubious, according to Kiesling. “Beatniks of that era have been portrayed as saying ‘Like, wow, man,’ although some linguists, including me, believe that usage was actually invented by screenwriters. It was Hollywood’s idea of how a beatnik would talk. I doubt that real beatniks ever said ‘Like, wow.’”
Overuse and misuse of “like” aren’t confined to teenagers and young adults, although those demographic groups might be called the main offenders—assuming you view departures from standardized speech as being offensive, which Kiesling does not.
“Language is primarily spoken, and the widespread notion of standardized speech has only been around for the last 200 years or so,” he says. “For tens of thousands of years before that, variations in word usage among different groups of human beings were taken for granted.”
A sociolinguist specializing in language and gender, Kiesling gained international recognition after publishing an article on the origins and usage of the word “dude”—as in, “Dude, what’s up?”—in the linguistics journal American Speech (Duke University Press, Fall 2004). Kiesling identified five “interactional functions” for “dude,” ranging from exclamation to signaling agreement. See story in the Nov. 29, 2004, Pitt Chronicle.
“In nearly all cases, there’s some kind of function for every word we use. It’s there for a reason, whether it’s being used consciously or unconsciously. But if you’re not fluent in the dialect, you’re not going to understand how the word is being used,” says Kiesling.
Just as older people who don’t address one another as “dude” might dismiss all “dude”-users as frat boys and surfers, folks unfamiliar with the nuances of “like” may unfairly assume that people who use the “L” word liberally are immature and unintelligent, Kiesling says.
Fairness aside, Kiesling recommends avoiding slang and verbal clutter in the workplace. “I see nothing wrong with advising someone, ‘If you go out socially with your coworkers after work and you’re all talking informally, you can use all the ‘likes’ you want. But when you’re in the office or a job interview, you should avoid that.”
Some question whether the overuse of “like” is really escalating.
“I don’t think it’s a more frequent barbarism than it was 15 years ago,” opines Pitt Professor of English H. David Brumble, who has been teaching in the department since 1970. Brumble believes the contemporary usage of “like” began in the 1950s and “really came into wide use among young people in the ‘60s.”
But Judith M. Stemmler, director of recruiting and client services in Pitt’s Office of Human Resources, said she “absolutely, absolutely” is getting “‘liked’ to death” by the 20-something applicants she and her staff interview for Pitt job positions. “I’m definitely hearing ‘like’ more often than I did five or 10 years ago,” Stemmler says.
“Even among our office’s interns, who are juniors and seniors, you hear ‘like’ in nearly every sentence. It seems to start early in school. I’m hearing my own eight-year-old and nine-year-old [children] already using ‘like’ a lot.”
Stemmler suspects that the widespread use of text messaging and the Internet help to explain why today’s teens and 20-somethings aren’t outgrowing their like-mindedness.
“Today’s students are still being taught professionally appropriate conversation skills in school, but they’re no longer practicing them so much outside the classroom,” she says. “In many cases, they’re choosing to communicate electronically rather than verbally. Just as letter-writing is a lost art, so, too, for many otherwise well-educated people, is speaking clearly. It takes practice.”
Stemmler advises job seekers to learn, if they haven’t already, the differences between professionally appropriate speech and the way that they talk with friends. Also, she recommends thinking before speaking.
“In job interviews, I’ve often heard applicants reply to questions by immediately blurting out ‘Well, I think, like…’ as they struggle to figure out what they want to say,” Stemmler recalls. “It’s okay to pause thoughtfully before answering; it can even make you sound more confident. It’s also acceptable to say ‘Please give me a minute to get my thoughts together on this’ before responding. I prefer that to hearing someone rattle off the first things that come into their heads.”
Few, if any, of the approximately 6,000 nonfaculty, nonunion staff jobs at Pitt require the lightening-quick verbal facility of, say, a hockey play-by-play announcer, Stemmler points out.
“What’s important in performing well in the workplace,” she says, “especially in positions that require interaction with the public, is just being able to speak in clear, concise sentences without a lot of distracting excess language like ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’ and ‘you knows’—and ‘likes.’”
