The Guardian just ran a piece about Megan C Reynolds's new book Like: A History of the World’s Most Hated (And Misunderstood) Word and it did that thing that only really well-written cultural criticism can do. That thing where your entire body floods with a kind of synaptic recognition: ohhhh, THAT'S what I've been sensing but hadn’t put into words yet.

The article traces the rise, fall, and quiet reclamation of "like" as a linguistic placeholder, a speech softener, a syntactic shimmy that lets you pack a punch without looking like you're trying to.

As I read the article, I realized that I've been navigating this battlefield for decades… not just linguistically but professionally, relationally, aesthetically.

Far from being filler, the word LIKE is a story of power and survival.

The soft power of survival syntax

Right after I read the piece, I remembered a video I’d watched a couple weeks ago from voice actor Tawny Platis. It was a brilliant little TikTok tracing 100 years of so-called "baby voice," from flapper rebellion to Marilyn Monroe’s breathy branding pivot to bimbo feminism’s pink-plastic reclaiming of softness as satire.

The Tiktok wasn’t just informative; it was like someone had tunneled into the historical archives of my nervous system and laid out the code-switching I’d performed without realizing the context. It made my fists clench. I felt finally seen and understood for how the affective girlishness I’d spent half my life trying to disguise wasn’t just a weakness or a quirk… it was part of an entire lineage of women using tone and syntax and affect as camouflage, currency, and choreography.

My dad told me I sounded stupid

And of course it made me think about my dad. Growing up in the early ‘90s, my boomer dad would interrupt me mid-sentence to tell me to stop saying "like" so much. He fretted that it made me uneducated, and that I wouldn’t be taken seriously. He knew I was an honor student nerd with straight As, and he told me that I needed to learn how to speak like someone who deserved to be listened to.

This correction was presented as benevolence. Fatherly guidance! I tried defending myself, aruging that because I was theatrical, I used “like” because I was often doing an impression. I wasn’t just recounting what the person said, I was actually performing what they were LIKE when they said it. The Guardian article talks about this as using the word to convey emotional states:

Despite my pushback, the reality is that I took my father’s guidance in, as so many of us do. The message wasn’t just that I needed to speak more clearly but that my voice, as it stood, sounded like it wasn’t the kind that mattered.

The message was that because I spoke like a girl, I wouldn’t be taken seriously.

I built an (offbeat) empire on girl voice

The irony here is that I ended up building a whole fucking career on the exact voice I was told to surgically remove!

Turns out, the enthusiastic, elliptical, breathless storytelling I use is my product, and once I started a publishing company, it became the core brand value of my pubs.

That voice is the whole fucking point! My writing voice isn’t always tidy or clean. It spirals and shimmers, and digresses and circles back and leaves threads dangling like stray hairs on a sweaty neck. It is not clean, but there is a precision to it.

It tells the truth sideways, because sometimes that's the only angle you can safely approach it from.

The boomer agent didn’t get it. I did.

Some of the anger that came up for me around this image was my memory from 2016 from when I shared a pitch for my book, From Shitshow To Afterglow, with my (boomer male) literary agent:

I remember feeling this sinking sensation in my gut, not because he was wrong, but because some old white guy in Midtown Manhattan probably wasn’t ever going to get it... OR me.

The gatekeepers of mainstream publishing weren’t always reflecting what I was seeing out in the world. At this point in my career I’m probably even more a publisher, and one that’s spent decades committed to building platforms where voices like mine aren’t an aberration.

I built the Offbeat Empire’s publications to be a place where writers’ affects were the main event! Because I understand that those affects are a reflection of how we’ve adapted our communication to survive.

The linguistic modes that are culturally coded as feminine (“like,” vocal fry, uptalk, emojis, apologies, girlish syntax) aren’t signs of immaturity or intellectual weakness. They’re adaptive, intelligent, relational strategies for survival and communication.

No one wants to be corrected. Everyone wants to be heard

As a publisher, I was never about sanding the edges off someone’s syntax, or make everyone sound more like NPR or The New Yorker. I wanted to amplify the language styles that culture had trained them to repress.

I didn’t care if a writer said "like" too much or spoke in emojis or ended every paragraph with an apology. I wanted that voice… the one that had been told it was too much, or auto-corrected into silence, the one that knew how to speak to its people in the language they actually used.

Which brings us back to TikTok, Gen Z, and people who think the latest slang is cringey or annoying or stupid. (Many of them my fellow Gen Xers!)

To that I say: talk less, listen more. As a 50 year old woman, my opinions on the evolutions in American language are irrelevant. Do I like irregardless? Do I enjoy that “literally” has come to mean figuratively?

IT DOESN’T MATTER! Language does not care what you think of it. Culture changes and attention spans shrink and the climate is collapsing and your teenage cousin is expressing collective grief through camp and filters and niche internet references you can’t parse.

Your lack of understanding is a YOU thing, not a them thing.

How you feel about new language is irrelevant. What really matters is whether you care enough to learn it so you can communicate with the people who are speaking it. Stay curious so that you can recognize that people are inventing entirely new lexicons of survival. The least you can do is try to understand the syntax.

PERSONAL LITTLE POST SCRIPT STUFF

• I shared both The Guardian article and the babytalk video with my father, and he was fascinated. He also apologized, but noted that “it doesn't seem to have set your own development one whit!” 🙄 (Love you, dad!)

• I think some of you know that I’ve been spooling up the Offbeat Empire’s consultancy, to compensate for getting laid off from Medium last fall. Well, six months after I launched the Empire’s consulting arm, I’m happy to say that my Q3 is completely booked! My client roster is full, working with folks ranging from a death doula working overcoming their business shame spirals, to three months of deep dive with a local nonprofit to audit and overhaul their marketing strategy & operations. It’s workingggg!

• Oh and I’m headed to Austin, TX next weekend to speak at a financial conference! I applied to speak as part of the AI track at the conference, but my pitch for From Efficiency To Empathy: Leveraging AI for Compassionate Credit Union Communications was such a hit that I got bumped up onto the main stage. (?!) This is way outside my usual B2B niches of wedding industry solopreneurs and scrappy independent publishers, but I’m excited!