Paul's Market Insights
Paul's Market Insights is our bi-weekly communique to provide clients with current insights on financial markets.
Written by Paul Siluch
June 19th, 2024
People today use the word ‘like’ a lot. Like, really a lot. Embraced by the youth, the word ‘like’ has now spread worldwide.
The word comes from ancient Norse and was used to describe something similar. “He’s a country fellow, like” for example. It then broadened to a wider variety of uses.
Shakespeare is blamed by some for using the more formal ‘liken’ and ‘belike’ and then substituting them with the shorter ‘like’ to echo what people were already saying.
Which means he may have just been riding a rising wave.
In a study done in the UAE with 17- to 24-year-old students at the American University of Sharjah, the word was used almost 20 times for every 1,000 words. That is 2% of all words used in everyday conversation. One student used ‘like’ for a full 5% of their verbal output.
The word ‘like’ was just an average word used the same amount of time for over a century. That is, until Valley Girl speech became popularized in movies starting in the 1980s. Some purists complain that its use made girls sound less intelligent (we do pick on girls’ speech more) even though boys may actually use it more today.
