Sociolinguist Alexandra D’Arcy explains how using “like” as a form of quotation opens up new avenues for storytelling:
There used to be a time when my story might have been: ‘I saw her enter the room and I was terrified that she would recognize me and so I crouched down.’ Which is actually sort of boring. But now you can tell that as: ‘I saw her, and I was like, oh my god! I was like, what if she sees me? I was like, oh my god, I’ve gotta hide. I was like, what am I supposed to say to her?’ And it can go on. I’ve seen it where you have eight quotes in a row of strictly first-person internal monologue where that monologue becomes action. That’s new.
Michael Bourne elaborates on the history of the linguistic usage (followed by a few reader updates):
D’Arcy traces the expanded use of “like” to speakers born in the 1960s, but says the language feature came into its own with speakers born in the 1970s, “so that by the time you get to speakers born in the 1980s, you get these entire sequences of quotations that recreate an internal thought process.” This accords with the pop cultural history of the usage, which first became famous when Moon Unit Zappa (born 1967) accompanied her father Frank Zappa’s 1982 hit song “Valley Girl,” with an improvised monologue taken from slang she’d overheard at parties and at the Sherman Oaks Galleria in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. The same year, Sean Penn starred in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, partly filmed at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, and the rest is, like, history.
A reader chimes in:
Ummm, seems to me that the addition of so many likes to story telling is also “sort of boring”. Why not:
She walked into the room and I thought, ‘Oh, my god! What if she sees me? What am I supposed to say to her? Oh, my God! I’ve got to hide!’ So, I dumped into a crouch.
I, like, sorta like that better.
Another:
Twenty or so years ago I was standing in a hallway at the university where I taught when two female students walked by. One was earnestly recounting a story to her friend. The part of her story that I overheard, in full:
“I was like ‘Yeah’, and he was like ‘No.’ And I was like ‘Yeah’, and he was like ‘No’. And I was like ‘Ye-ah’, and he was like …”
