Leaving room for disagreement is gracious, not timid.
"If 'I reckon' is warm and quaint and Chaucer's 'I guess' is literary and noble, then we ought to wonder why 'I feel like' is taken as a marker of rhetorical weakness." — John McWhorter |
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A major difference between how I as a linguist hear the way people speak American these days and how a great many others do is that what they hear as sloppy, lazy and unsure I hear as broad-minded and polite. |
The modern use of "like" is sometimes a hedge, but just as often it is used as a way to gently revise what your interlocutor may be thinking. "A whole family was in there. There were, like, grandmothers and cousins and grandfathers." That isn't someone unsure what a grandmother is but someone saying, "You may think I just mean a mom and dad and their kids, but I mean a whole clan." |
The modern "totally" — "We're totally going to get there before 6" — is a way of saying, "We know that some people think we won't get there, but we will." That is, "totally" acknowledges how the other person is thinking. |
The modern "I feel like" is another example. I hear constantly that it means that young people are afraid to express an opinion, when really it's just a way of expressing an opinion that politely acknowledges that there are other ways of seeing things. It's frankly rather sweet, and I wrote a newsletter about it this week. |
Expressions, I explained, can change like fashions. But before you dismiss the change as a symptom of language's degradation, consider that it might instead be a sign of language's evolution. |
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