Like, literally, and the rise of filler words
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Issue #181: how inspiration works, indigenous languages, and doing it right
By Harris Sockel
I was watching a recording of myself in a Zoom meeting recently and realized I say “like” too much. Every remark I made was riddled with “like,” “uh,” or “um.” It was embarrassing, though the most embarrassing part is how unaware of it I usually am.
“Too much” is totally subjective, but I think Ron Miller would agree. He’s a historian and educator who, in a recent Medium post, examined the rise of two of the most common (and most hated?) filler words: like and literally.
Let’s take “like.” It’s a word meant to avoid precision. When you use “like,” you’re intentionally distancing yourself from what you’re saying. It’s a device for, in Miller’s words, “withholding commitment to a position or an idea.”
Enter: “Literally.” People love to hate on millennials who use “literally” in figurative contexts (no, you’re not LITERALLY DYING even if you’re laughing really hard). In fact, the word has been used figuratively since at least the 1700s: Charlotte Brontë wrote about being “literally suffocated” by someone’s bad attitude. Still, it’s exploded in popularity over the last 20 years — roughly coinciding with the rise of the internet.
In a world where so much of what we create and react to exists in our minds and on screens, Miller argues, “we want to hold on to some scrap of truth… so we desperately insist that things or ideas are ‘literally’ what they are and not political disinformation, digital manipulations or ephemeral products of social construction.”
Maybe these words aren’t popular just because they make getting through a conversation easier. Maybe they’re popular because they help us express aspects of being alive right now that are really hard to communicate in other ways: In so many aspects of life and work, it’s, like, sort of hard to tell what’s literally real vs. not.
✨ Recent must-reads in 1 sentence
- The harder you work at something, the more inspired you become — because your subconscious starts working on problems for you.
- You can replace Notion — and most expensive apps — with a combo of native apps like Reminders, Notes, and Numbers.
- TIL: 560 indigenous languages exist in Latin America.
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