Growing up, I’ve noticed that teenage girls, specifically the way that we talk, has been the subject of mockery and ridicule. If you’ve spent any time online, I’m sure you can picture the men on the internet in wigs—batting their eyelashes, joking about female intelligence, and using words such as “totally,” “literally,” and “like.”
The popular filler word, “like,” has been particularly bashed by arrogant men who feel as though girls’ use of the word is too colloquial and annoying. However, I believe that the word has revolutionized casual language and been integral to the culture of the modern day, liberated woman.
Linguistically speaking, “like” actually makes a lot of sense in most scenarios. Take, for example, this sentence: “Cat has, like, ten piercings.” You wouldn’t say, “Cat has 10 piercings,” if you weren’t completely confident in the number of piercings she had. If she might have 9 siblings, or 11, the sentence wouldn’t accurately express your approximation. So, “Cat has, like, ten piercings” is a perfectly appropriate and necessary use of the word. Now, you could argue that the use of “like” is too casual. Sure, you could instead say, “Cat has approximately ten piercings.” However, I think anyone would be a little off-put if someone said that in a casual conversation. And that’s exactly what “like,” and many other common teenage words, are meant for: not eloquent, professional speech, but real and comfortable conversation.
Now, sometimes the use of “like” can’t really be linguistically justified (such as in this sentence: “We, like, went to the movies and then I was like, ‘I, like, love this movie.’”). This is where the feminine liberation comes into play. For decades, women have been prevented from having their voices heard. Now, in a world where women can be in professional environments and speak their minds, they’re still silenced. The big strong alpha male bulldozes intelligent women and prevents them from speaking. And of course, women adapted, speaking faster, speaking higher, and using filler words. But, inevitably, that kind of fast-paced, “like” riddled speech became the main point of ridicule of the ditzy girl character. We use “like,” and we become the butt of the joke; we don’t use “like,” and we are spoken over.
I call for the end of satirizing young women. I’m sick of people hyperfocusing on every aspect of femininity. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: let women be.