My 10th-grade honors English class read The Scarlet Letter. We spent a great deal of time dissecting Puritan mores and decrying the patriarchy. You know, just like every other 10th-grade English class in America.
Unlike every other 10th-grade English class in America, however, we had The Scarlet L.
If someone in my class said “like” one too many times, our teacher, the great Jessica Good, would have us come to the front of the classroom and sit in a chair with a giant cardboard L on a string around our neck for the duration of the period. It was all done with great humor, but it also forced us all to really think about how we spoke and — more importantly — how we sounded to others when we tried to make serious literary observations but sounded more like Moon Unit Zappa than aspiring American studies majors (OK, that may have just been me, but this particular class was foundational in helping me discover that college major).
And while I still, more than 30 years later, remember the omnipresent threat of the Scarlet L and make every effort to eliminate “like” from my formal speech, I also think fondly of the Scarlet L as a brand of a different kind than the one that appeared on Arthur Dimmesdale’s chest. It’s a symbol of my generation.
As every good Gen Xer knows, the use of the extraneous “like” (h/t to my friend Elizabeth, who suggested this topic!) in our generation’s quotidian English can be traced back to the 1982 song “Valley Girl” by the aforementioned Ms. Zappa. As seen here on Solid Gold, which I hope was also the highlight of your week back in 1982.
Technically, it goes back a little farther than that, to the Beatnik poets of the 1950s, but the Boomers can’t have everything. We’re the slacker generation, we get the slacker word.
And honestly, if asked to sum up Gen X in a single word, I think it would be the extraneous like, Scarlet L and all.
The linguist John McWhorter, in a 2016 piece in The Atlantic, said that the way you know that the use of “like” as we know it is here to stay, Scarlet L notwithstanding, is that it is as consistently used by Gen Xers as it is by their kids. It was not, and is no longer, simply slang, McWhorter said; it is evidence of a wholesale change in English grammar. It is, McWhorter wrote both a new way of quoting someone (“She was like, ‘I told you so.’”) and a means of making a statement more hypothetical, less threatening (“Let’s like, flip the switch!”).
What could be more Gen X than changing our very language with a word that defines us as slackers?
https://taylormali.com/poems/like-lilly-like-wilson/
But I like, like like.......and I'm a Boomer, not a slacker.....