"To be like" or "to be, like." That is the question.

Ever since I was a kid and would read people's commentary on kidspeak—you know, those condescending pieces, ranging from the hysterically outraged to the satirically scholarly, in which old people tell other old people that today's youth are in the process of savagely murdering the English language—it has always seemed to me that folks have fundamentally misunderstood the mechanics of "like" in the recounting of dialogue.

People above the age of, like, 50 seem to think that there is only one young-person "like": the "like" I just used, earlier in this sentence (which is, admittedly, almost entirely a kind of verbal tic, communicative waste*)—hence the egregious misconception that young people use the verb to be as a synonym for the verb to say.

I suspect that most older people would see no particular difference between the following two sample sentences:

1. I was like, "Oh...my...God." (Right!)
2. I was, like, "Oh...my...God." (Wrong!)

In the first sentence, the substitute for (roughly) to say is not to be but rather to be like. In the second sentence, the substitute is indeed to be, the word like, sandwiched between commas, being an expendable aside, that "verbal tic" mentioned above. I'm going to go ahead and say that nobody talks like sentence #2.

People do talk like this: "I was, like, so angry." That sentence is grammatically similar to sentence #2 but grammatically dissimilar to sentence #1: it is not what young people are doing when they are reporting on something they said. Young people are things (and therefore, yes, "are, like" things), but they aren't what they say; they "are like" what they say. To be like has come to be a (slangy, yes) verb of its own.

I say "like" too much (a bad habit I picked up in middle school, actually rather deliberately at the time)—but I never, ever use the verb "to be" to report something that someone said. "I was, 'Oh my God!'" seems to me about as nonsensical as I gather all of this seems to older people—and/but I wonder whether that's why it seems so nonsensical to them, that they don't see the difference between "was like" and "was, like."

Nor is this usage of to be like an arbitrary thing, some kind of idiotic nonsense muscling its way into common usage. When I say, "I was like," and then quote myself, I am in fact using like in a rather standard way, just in a less-standard (but of course increasingly standard) context: I really am telling you what I was like. What I say is not what I am, but it is, arguably, a kind of descriptive information—particularly since (and this is pretty important) dialogue reported with "I was like" is most appropriately taken to be non-verbatim (see first footnote because it's similar reasoning).

The clearest way to follow me (if you don't already) might be to think of this analogous example:

• "I was like, 'Arrrrgh!'" (or, "I was like..." [makes cartoonishly frustrated face])

Essentially, in this context, what you are doing is an impression of yourself. Is this, when you think about it, substantively different from a sentence like, "I was like a crazy person"? Below you can see a kind of evolutionary chart:

• SPEAKER: I was like a crazy person!
• SPEAKER: I was like— (Does impression of a crazy person)
• SPEAKER: I was like (in character, as a crazy person), "God damn it!!!"
• SPEAKER: I was like, "God damn it!!!"†

Can you see how that "like" is not just verbal waste, and how that last sentence communicates something slightly but significantly different from "I said, 'God damn it!!!'"?

The sentence, "I was, like, 'God damn it!!!'"—with the like set apart by commas—would communicate something rather different: it would mean that the speaker was "God damn it!!!" (or was more or less "God damn it!!!"), which makes no sense at all.

Fortunately, nobody talks like that.‡

This is different. (via)
P.S. Is "stop saying like" someone's name (q.v.)?

BONUS QUESTION: I frequently trip myself up by beginning a sentence with, "I'll either or both..." The shortest answer may be that you can't really start a sentence that way, but come on. Why not? Anyway, here's the problem I run into: if, let's say, the two things in question (of which I'll do one or both) are singing and dancing, then do I say, "I'll either or both sing and dance" or "I'll either or both sing or dance"? Maybe "I'll either or both sing and/or dance"? Problem there is that the either comes first, then the both, so wouldn't it sort of have to be, "I'll either or both sing or/and dance"?
     Then I realized that, just as a verb will always agree with the subject closest to it in an or situation, so must the following conjunction almost certainly agree: in other words, when you say "either or both," what follows is going to behave as if you're only talking about the both.
      I'm satisfied with that.



* Almost but not quite entirely because it communicates a certain kind of doubt. "People above the age of, like, 50" is different from "People above the age of 50" because the former is saying, "I'm not quite sure what the age cut-off is, but I'm going to call it 50, with the understanding that this is a casual guess and entirely open to revision or correction."

† Note, too, that all this actually provides us with a more subtle range of possibilities. Just as (as you, I hope, learned in school) one can say either, "I said, 'You need to get out of here,'" or, "I said that he needed to get out of here," with the one suggesting a direct quote and the other suggesting a general sense of what was said [Cf.], the was like constructions allow for another level of nonverbatim reporting that is really quite useful.

‡ I think people do say, "I was all..." However, that's a parallel construction to "I was like" and works the same way: again, the verb to be is not the operative grammatical thing going on.