Why is it a good idea to avoid 'like' in English?

Question

In the video JULIA BOORSTIN -- Interview a Broadcaster! -- American English (0:34 to 1:20), a reporter from an American news television channel mentions that it's not a good idea to use the word 'like'.

I've tried to find some information about it but nothing comes up in Google. Does anyone know why 'like' shouldn't be used and in what contexts it's invalid?

Below the line is my first guess, but it's completely wrong and can be ignored:

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I assume that it's not about this kind of sentence:

I like learning.

But it's more about this kind of sentences:

• Flying a plane is like driving a car but it's a bit more complicated.
• You can multiply a number by two to have an even number, like 3*2=6.

Answer 1

Some people, like use like all the time, as like, a sort of filler, like, so often that it like gets in the way of understanding what they like mean. And like, David Foster Wallace might get away with it, though some would like criticise him for it too, but it can also make what you say like sort of uncertain sounding.

The same applies to other filler such as um and eh, but it's worse with like because that does have a semantic interpretation those lack, suggesting that you are qualifying what you say; e.g. "It was like really good to see you" suggests that it wasn't quite really good, just something approximating it.

Fillers do serve a role; we do sometimes need time to consider what we want to say next, but heavy use weakens diction and impedes comprehension.

Edit: sort of can sometimes be over-used in a similar way. I notice I added sort of into my example above in places where it would be ill-advised, without thinking about it; it just came naturally when trying to write badly for the example.

Answer 2

I think they're referring to using "like" to prevent yourself from being interrupted during a pause for thought, similar to the way "um" or "uh" is used. This is often considered a disfluency. The stereotype is of a young girl speaking a run on, rambling sentence with "like" between each phrase.

Here's a particularly disturbing example. "We were, like, forty minutes into the flight,and then, like, we, like, hear this, like ..."

Answer 3

A key part of the quote from the video is that Julia was not to sound like an L.A. Valley girl

Julia: ...and both of them were determined that I was not going to sound like an L.A. Valley girl,
Rachel: okay
J: so my whole life they were obsessed with this idea that I enunciate and pronounce things properly and fully, and I not use the word "like".

If you're not familiar with the stereotypical L.A. Valley girl accent (also known as "Valleyspeak"), it typically involves excessive use of the word "like".

Answer 4

A very different reason might lie behind the reporter's remark, particularly because American English is involved. One of my elementary school teachers during the early 1960s despaired of getting my classmates and me to use "like" correctly due to the corrupting influence of a widely televised cigarette jingle: "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." The corruption was not that we might start to smoke, but that "like" had been used instead of "as." The jingle stuck better than her instruction had, most of us could not reliably tell when "like" was acceptable, and she finally gave up. "If you are not sure you are using 'like' correctly," she told us resignedly, "do not use it at all." This was not a local issue. After moving 2,000 miles from the West Coast to the Great Lakes, I encountered teachers who despaired of the same problem, stemming from the same jingle, yielding the same resigned admonishment. To this day, I avoid using "like" as anything but a verb, and seldom hear my fellow Baby Boomers use it any other way. Cigarette commercials on U.S. TV were banned as of January 1, 1971, so the teachers of Gen Xers might have had an easier time getting them to grasp the proper uses of "like."

Answer 5

Use like in that 'similar to/ such as/ ' sense when nothing else needs to be stated in order to be complete and unambiguous.

he used to have a car like mine
they were like brothers
she looked nothing like Audrey Hepburn
why are you talking about me like that?
the cautionary vision of works like Animal Farm and 1984

Both your presumed to-avoid examples are grammatical.

Flying a plane is like driving a car but it's a bit more complicated. (similar to)
You can multiply a number by two to have an even number, like 3*2=6. (the same way as, for example)

However, like is a poor choice in the first case because it is unclear here as to 'in what way/ in what respect(s)'; it even sounds like you contradict yourself later.

Flying a plane is like similar to driving a car but it's a bit more complicated. ('similar to' cautions that it is 'like but not the same').

In the second case, the intention is to present a use-case/ example (3*2=6) to illustrate the process just stated (multiply a number by two to have an even number).

You can multiply a number by two to have an even number, like for example, 3*2=6.

Though like can function as more than one POS, has many uses and is probably the easiest to read and understand, it can easily make a statement ambiguous. Avoid it for that reason, in favor of a more precise word that makes the statement clear.