“She was like… and then he was like… and then I was like…”

Just when professors were correcting students for using the word “like” as a filler between words, a linguist at Temple University in Philadelphia said there is merit in using the word, and other such word fillers.

Muffy Siegel, an English faculty member at Temple, said she began her research after noticing her daughters’ frequent use of the word.

“Although I warned [my daughters] not to use it for school presentations and job interviews, in general our language changes when it needs to, so it probably fulfills its purpose,” she told the Daily during a phone interview on Sept. 6.

Siegel said the issue came to a head one day when rounding up library books to return.

“[My daughter] used the word `like’ to weaken a strong noun phase, and the linguist in me got interested because people think the word `like’ has no effect at all and is just a sound people make. I knew right away something interesting was going on,” she said.

Siegel used her daughter’s English project as a chance to do some research.

“My daughter’s project involved asking the question, `What is an individual?,’ which really stumped people. She

taped the responses in natural settings like locker rooms and hallways and I watched to see how often they used the word `like’ in their responses.”

Siegel’s results, published in the Aug. 19 issue of The Journal of Semantics, have been met with mixed response.

“There are people who tell me I’m just terrible and I’m encouraging America’s youth to ruin themselves and to paraphrase,” she said. “They say I’m making excuses for undereducated, lazy, ignorant teenagers who want to use incorrect speech.”

Barbara Mack, associate professor in the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, said using the word `like’ is “sloppy, lazy and intolerable.”

“Like is being used as a substitute for the word about or approximate,” she said. “Such as, `There were like six people there’ rather than, `There were about six people there.’ “

She said `like’ is also being used as a substitute for the word `said.’

“It allows you to be inaccurate if you want to hedge a quotation. You can’t really get a grasp on what the speaker means,” Mack said. “You find the word being used to substitute whenever someone doesn’t have the mental clarity to use the correct English word.”

Jill Wagner, associate professor of anthropology with a specialty in linguistics, said each culture has filler words used in everyday conversation.

“When I was in France they used words that would translate to `um’ in America,” she said.

Though English and speech experts might frown on using fillers, Wagner said linguists aren’t concerned.

“We’re not worried about correctness of speech,” she said. “We look at what people really say and work from there.”

Mack said she disagrees with Siegel’s results. “I believe she is deeply and fundamentally wrong,” she said. “The overuse and misuse of the word `like’ is denigrating the quality of thought. I am horrified at the number of students I deal with who cannot carry on basic human communication without using the word every two seconds.”

Wagner has seen many uses of the word `like’ over the years.

“English and speech teachers are trying to teach standard dialect and formal academic dialect so they discourage these words,” she said. “In normal everyday speech, that’s just what people do.

“People do use fillers when they need time to think about what they’re saying, when they’re not quite sure, want to hedge or are introducing exaggeration,” Wagner said.