A Fluffy Word with a Hefty Problem
Gus Andrews / SUMMER 2003
IN A SEPTEMBER 2002 ARTICLE TITLED “COSMO’S CRASH Course in Office Talk,”
Cosmopolitan
helpfully guided its readers’ anxiety to a part of life they might not yet have agonized about: their speech. “If you’re like many young women,” the article confided, “you undermine your professional profile by littering your speech with words such as ‘um,’ ‘like,’ and ‘you know.’”
The article’s author trotted out a series of career consultants to reinforce this idea. “Not only does using such words as ‘like’ and ‘you know’ make you seem unpolished and inexperienced,” explained Kristen M. Gustafson, author of the book
Graduate! Everything You Need to Succeed After College,
who’s quoted in the piece, “but it makes people disregard your ideas because you sound as if you don’t have confidence in what you are saying.”
Slang-bashing is nothing new. Along with rap, heavy metal, television watching, gum chewing, teen sex, and other faves, juvenile speech patterns are periodically written up as a sign of the decline of Western civilization. “Like,” in particular, comes in for heavy abuse, thanks in part to the expression’s longevity. While slang descriptors such as “groovy,” “fresh,” and “radical” were quick to fade into peculiar-sounding obsolescence, “like” has retained its currency in youth culture for over forty years.
The beatniks were the first group to be tarred with the “like” brush in the popular imagination. Maynard G. Krebs, the misappropriation of beat
cool featured on early-1960s TV show
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,
was known to pepper his lazy lines with “like.” Whether beatniks actually said “like” or whether it was introduced into mainstream pop culture to exaggerate or mock the differences between beat speech and “normal” speech is unclear. Regardless, the word continued to be associated with youth—and, more specifically, with the fringe elements of youth culture—throughout the ’60s and ’70s. The 1986 BBC documentary series
The Story of English
linked the origins of “like” to the surf culture that emerged on the Southern California coast in the late 1950s. From there, the documentary hypothesizes, it headed inland to suburban malls, where it eventually fell into the vocabulary of the Valley Girl, that brainless, shopping-obsessed bimbo archetype native to California’s San Fernando Valley.
Musician Frank Zappa and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Moon Unit, breathed life into the caricature with 1982’s “Valley Girl,” wherein Moon Unit parodied her motormouthed peers from Encino in a song that introduced the rest of the world to Val slang like “gag me with a spoon” and “grody.” The teensploitation classic
Valley Girl
, which lovingly lampooned its namesake, followed in 1983.
More than a decade later, another teen movie—the
Emma
update
Clueless
, with its Val-speaking, white (or at least whitewashed) Beverly Hills teen socialites—presumed that the Valley dialect’s cultural associations had shifted from brainless consumerism to a classier brainless affluence. This is probably why, when I asked a twelve-year-old student of mine in the South Bronx what it means to speak professionally—as opposed to, in her words, “talking ghetto”—she responded, “It means, like, you have to, like, talk like this.”
Was she channeling the class implications of “like,” or its race implications? It’s hard to separate the two. Perhaps she got an earful of Hilary, the spoiled older sister in the African-American family on the early-1990s sitcom
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
. Hilary’s accent was pure Val, and it certainly signaled upper-class status. Her speech patterns, along with those of her lawyer dad, preppy brother, and snooty butler, provided linguistic contrast to Will Smith’s ghetto authenticity.
I grew up near the Valley itself, so “like” has subtly different class implications for me. My prep-school friends and I might well have agreed to meet at, like, the Wet Seal in the Galleria, like, this weekend. But we ignored
our own “bad” grammar when conjuring up the stupidest character we could imagine, an airhead whose rapid-fire speech was peppered with “like,” “totally bitchin’,” and “ohmigawd!” Put bluntly, Valspeak was white trash. We were supposed to abandon mall crawling for more sophisticated pursuits as we got older, and we were supposed to grow out of “like,” too. Our parents looked out for our class standing. I got my first drubbing for using the word at age thirteen: A friend and I were in the car, talking excitedly and with abandon, when I realized that my stepmother and father were giggling in the front seat. Eventually, my stepmother turned around to face us and said, “Forty-three.”
“Forty-three what?” I asked.
“You’ve said ‘like’ forty-three times in the last five minutes.” She snickered.
Despite its rich history and subtle sociopolitical meanings, “like” is still just bad English to most adults, an error to be corrected. To linguists, fortunately, the phenomenon is worthy of more thought. In February 2002, the serendipitously named Muffy E. A. Siegel published a paper on “like” in the
Journal of Semantics
. Linguists are generally concerned with describing how words are used rather than with chastising the user, so the article is an assessment of the rules by which the word is deployed, with comments on where “like” challenges established linguistic theories.
Siegel hypothesizes that the use of “like” indicates that the speaker isn’t committing to the accuracy of what she or he is saying. This can work in a number of ways. For example, in the phrase “Like, a giant moose knocked our tent over,” “like” could be taken to modify the whole phrase, in which case the speaker is giving one example of many things that went wrong on a camping trip. It could be modifying “moose,” signaling that the speaker is employing hyperbole (it could have been a small deer that knocked the tent over). Or, more simply, it could mean the speaker wasn’t clear on exactly what kind of animal had knocked down the tent. (Granted, this is not a new concept. Even my father, who laughed along with my stepmother’s “like” tally, will defend his phrasing “like, five cars at the show” to mean “about” or “approximately.”)
Siegel does not address the use of the word “like” in the phrase “was like,” where it replaces “said.” (For example: “I was like, ‘That dog has got to go,’ and she was like, ‘What? He’s such a sweet dog,’ and I was like, ‘He’s peed on the carpet four times this morning.’”) But her theory works by extension:
“Was like” is a good way for a speaker to indicate that the dialogue she is re-creating should not be taken as the exact words spoken by the participants. This extension also makes a place in English for the phrase “And she’s all …”
Siegel’s understanding of “like” as a modifier places the word among “maybe,” “possibly,” “you know,” and similar phrases known as hedges. So it’s not surprising that “like” is associated more with women than with men. Since the 1970s, sociolinguists have noted that women often use hedges to soften the impact of their statements. What would-be grammar police (like the
Cosmopolitan
article’s author) don’t acknowledge is that hedges say less about an individual woman’s lack of confidence than they do about society’s expectation that women not be assertive.
Either way, it seems to be a good idea to help young women root “like” out of their speech entirely. But Siegel also offers a more positive perspective on the use of the word. Studying twenty-three tape-recorded interviews of high-school honors students—both boys and girls—from suburban Philadelphia, Siegel found that spontaneity of speech, not insecurity, was most strongly correlated with a flurry of “likes.”
While she found that girls did use “like” much more often than boys, she also discovered that speakers of either gender said it less often when they had more time to plan what they were saying. The speaker’s comfort level and the informality of the setting also seemed to increase the use of “like.” “Happily,” Siegel concludes, “if girls use ‘like’ more than boys, it may indicate as much a gift for intimacy and spontaneity as insecurity.”
Alas, fewer young women probably read the
Journal of Semantics
than
Cosmo,
so the results of this survey are unlikely to do much to break the vicious cycle that plagues “like” users: You don’t feel confident in what you’re saying, so you use “like”; your parents pick on you for saying “like,” so you feel less confident in what you’re saying; you say “like” more, they pick on you again, and on it goes.
The thrust of popular language use will never sway the gatekeepers of the English language. While “like” and other nonstandard usages spread to their very living rooms, they still cling to the shibboleth that bad English displays the speaker’s stupidity. Meanwhile, my twelve-year-old student determines the meaning of “like” from
Clueless’s
Cher and Dionne. What happens when she meets my stepmother, or the
Cosmo
article’s author? Will
she try to speak Val in an attempt to raise her class standing? How many potential employers will dismiss her as incompetent, either for her adopted Valspeak or for her native South Bronxese?
You can’t maintain linguistic purity by sheer force of will, or even through English classes. People don’t have to be taught language to learn it. Babies are naturally wired to learn language by example, whether via parents or TV. By now, kids who’ve never heard of a Valley Girl are surely learning to say “like” from their parents. They may be admonished by those same parents not to use the word; they may learn to code-switch, turning off their use of the word in formal situations—but it’s not likely that they’ll give it up. Despite attempts to stigmatize it, “like” will live on.
What can
Cosmo’s
job consultants do about it, aside from undermining more women’s confidence? According to Siegel, they’ll have to deal with it. “The language mavens always say, ‘Oh, they’re wrecking the language,’” she told
The Philadelphia Inquirer
in 2002. “And it’s always girls and working people [who are blamed for it]. But languages change because they need to change. There are so many more girls and working people than there are language mavens.”
Why Does the Media Love Mean Girls?
Gabrielle Moss / WINTER 2005
LIKE ALMOST ALL FIRST DAYS OF HIGH SCHOOL IN CINEMA history, that of Cady Heron, protagonist of
Mean Girls
(2004), goes poorly. A practical, homeschooled teen raised in Africa by zoologist parents, Cady is mystified by the social customs of American high schoolers and confused by teachers who don’t trust her; she ends up eating her lunch alone in the girls’ bathroom. Cady, who apparently has never had a negative or hostile thought in her life, is quickly accosted by two very different types of mean girls: the sarcastic “art freak” Janis and the bitchy clique the Plastics. Cady is enlisted in a revenge scheme Janis has hatched against head Plastic Regina George, but soon finds herself enjoying the perks of popularity enough to attempt to unseat Regina and become Queen Bee herself.
Mean Girls
spins a fairly pedestrian yarn about the seduction (and subsequent redemption) of an innocent outsider by the posh lifestyles and flexible morals of the popular kids. But while most teen films are based on a potent mix of recalled adolescent fantasies and repressed memories,
Mean Girls
was based on a bestselling self-help book—Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 book
Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence
—that’s one of the central texts of a movement that for the past few years has galvanized parents and their daughters against an alleged epidemic of meanness in their midst.
Spearheaded by
Queen Bees
, Rachel Simmons’s 2002 book
Odd Girl Out:
The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls,
and mentoring/workshop programs like the Ophelia Project, the battle against mean girls ostensibly focuses on teaching girls responsibility for their actions and solidarity with their peers. A natural extension of the girl power quasifeminism of the ’90s, the fight against mean girls purports to address a problem overlooked by adults and bring it to an audience of youth and their parents.
A closer examination of the assumptions behind the anti-mean-girls movement, however, reveals a far more complicated situation. Though its tenets are beneficial to girls, mean-girls theory also has a dark side, where harmful female stereotypes are given a girl power-savvy spin and spouted by the very people who claim to be working in girls’ best interests. The media’s reception of the subject raises some disturbing questions about girls, power, and society, and the assumptions inherent in mean-girls rhetoric could leave a powerful and troubling mark on teen culture.
Mean-girls theory dates back to the pioneering 1992 book
Of Mice and Women: Aspects of Female Aggression,
which featured work by (among others) editors Kaj Björkqvist and Pirkko Niemelä, whose studies have been mentioned in almost every article on the girl-bullying phenomenon. In a study of gender and aggression among preteen girls, Björkqvist claimed that women were more likely to display anger “relationally,” within the context of their social relationships, rather than in the physical way that’s traditionally perceived as “aggressive.” Distilling the major forms of relational aggression—gossiping, rumor spreading, socially isolating one’s peers—through subsequent study, researchers concluded that when it was given equal weight to physical and more outright verbal expressions of anger, women were just as aggressive as men.
Around the same time, pop psychologists were taking notice of the inner lives of teenage girls.
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls,
Mary Pipher’s 1994 bestseller on the dangers of being young, American, and female, described female adolescence as tumultuous, scary, and a “hurricane” from which “no girl escapes.” Pipher’s work lent teenage girls and their problems a respect they rarely received in popular culture but said little about the possible role of suppressed aggression. This idea was left untouched until Lyn Mikel Brown’s 1998 study of teen-girl anger and aggression,
Raising Their Voices
. Brown made explicit her intention to contradict the image, by then well developed, of the teen girl as victim. Advocating
“healthy” anger (as opposed to “destructive” aggression) as crucial to girls’ self-respect, she linked it to the development of “strong voices” and the ability to “actively resist dominant cultural notions of femininity.”
While Brown’s book didn’t cause quite the sensation of
Ophelia
et al., by the time it was published her topic was more relevant than ever. Taking its cues from the politically aware riot-grrrl culture, the ’90s girl power phenomenon—typified by postmodern (and feminism-literate) teen thrillers like Scream and Jawbreaker, a new national mania for women’s soccer, and the Spice Girls—championed a kind of wholesome, boisterous aggression. Though girl power, less a movement than a marketing pitch, stopped short of recognizing the many reasons a girl might have to be angry, it nailed the connection between self-esteem and the ability to display aggression in the dual meaning of one of the era’s popular slogans: “Girls Kick Ass.”
By the end of the ’90s, any truly empowering elements of girl power had been lost in its marketing blitz, and pop psychologists seemed to lose interest in teen girls—until 2002, when “mean girls” became a media buzz phrase. Wedding Björkqvist’s theories of relational aggression to
Reviving Ophelia’
s take on girlhood under siege, the mean-girls zeitgeist proclaimed by
Queen Bees and Wannabes, Odd Girl Out
, and others transformed teen girls from victims to victimizers. Mean girls made the cover of
Newsweek
and were the subject of hand-wringing everywhere from
The Washington Post
to
Oprah.
But an examination of the mean-girls coverage reveals a media interested in a few things besides girls’ self-esteem.
Much of the coverage focused on
Queen Bees,
with its breezy tone and sound-bite-ready quotes. But its popularity may also stem from Wiseman’s dark, not-so-sympathetic depiction of teenage girls. Despite good intentions,
Queen Bees
has some weak points that can be (and have been) interpreted as license to denounce girls as catty and shallow.
Wiseman presents her book as a relatively lighthearted guide to the adolescent heart of darkness she terms “Girl World.” But in her reach for humor and hipness, she reinforces much of what she seeks to eliminate. Unlike Simmons, who locates the roots of girls’ meanness in the cultural demands of niceness, Wiseman luridly promises to reveal the “nasty things” girls do to one another, but she doesn’t take societal expectations regarding female aggression into account in explaining them. Though she
rattles off the usual list of harmful media influences—music videos, sexualized advertising, etc.—she narrows her argument by asserting that girls themselves, not the popular culture that feeds them, are the “prime enforcer of these standards.”
Furthermore, though Wiseman is genuinely interested in the health, safety, and success of teen girls, those reporting on her work are not. The revelation of the news articles and TV specials that followed the 2002 release of
Queen Bees
and
Odd Girl Out
was not that America had created an emotionally stifling culture for its daughters that sometimes caused them to act out in calculated and hurtful ways, but that girls were, well, mean. The constructive ideas suggested by Wiseman, Simmons, and others for promoting self-esteem and challenging the teen social system were left out of nearly every article on the subject. In a March 2002 article in
The Observer
(U.K.), Tim Field, author of
Bullycide
(and presumably an authority on this sort of thing), declares girls “better” at bullying than boys and is “appalled” by the lengths to which girls go to commit acts of relational aggression. A 2002 episode of
Oprah
on “the hidden culture of girls’ aggression” revolved not around the question of why popularity has become paramount to teen girls’ existence or how that might be changed, but, as
Oprah.com
summarized it, “Why are girls so mean?” Questions of cultural and social responsibility for girls’ well-being were quickly lost in the sensationalistic and frequently sexist rush to reveal “the truth” about girls. In the ensuing melee, the authors’ compelling ideas were spun into stereotypes disguised as social science.
At best, mean-girls theory has been lumped in with the larger field of bully psychology, completely ignoring the gender element except when it provides a little added titillation. At worst, the subject has become a safe cover for hostilities and fears about teenage girls and their power. The media’s interest seems to be less about spreading awareness of behavior that hurts girls than about the potential of having real, psychological proof that the only asses girls kick are each other’s.
While most of the media dust has settled around this “crisis,” mean-girls theory has left its imprint on pop culture. One of the most obvious is the aforementioned film, which alternately embraces and mocks its source material, one moment parodying the idea that “meanness” is something that can be exorcised, the next suggesting that one can be reformed
with some well-timed apologies. The film showcases, at its dramatic turning point, a style of consciousness-raising that Wiseman developed for her youth-mentoring program. When hostilities are high and all the film’s female students are mad at each other, they must engage in a practice Wiseman calls “owning up,” which entails a girls-only group publicly apologizing to each other. (Curiously, the practice was omitted from the curriculum for boys that Wiseman later developed.)
Mean Girls
scoffs at the act’s potential to heal wounds—in fact, it shows the possibly more realistic outcome of dividing the girls further.
However, when Cady does her own “owning up” after being elected prom queen, it achieves the desired forgiveness, and in the end everyone hangs out in one big, nonjudgmental group. But the plot points that take them there are suspect: Innocent Cady doesn’t become a Machiavellian power puppeteer because she has anger to vent; she does so just because it’s so damn easy. Conversely, the film’s end finds former Queen Bee Regina channeling her hostility into a new life as a lacrosse player, suggesting that her anger didn’t stem from any specific place, and that her emotional health is simply dependent on “burning it off” in a socially acceptable manner. Likewise, sarcastic Janis is mellowed by the love of mathlete Kevin G. (These are, of course, age-old ideas for how to calm overly aggressive women.) And in the “owning up” scene, a teacher—played by the film’s screenwriter, Tina Fey—comments, in response to a question about the girls’ self-esteem, that self-esteem is not the issue: “They seem pretty pleased with themselves.”
The mean girl has been absorbed as a pop culture figure, while any insight regarding how she got that way (or the degree of cultural change necessary to eliminate her kind) is forgotten. Self-help has been traded for a more traditional moralizing. Plus, it’s supposed to be funny. In boycentric films like
Lord of the Flies, Bully,
and the recent
Mean Creek,
teen male anger—which frequently erupts in violence—is given serious moral dimension; in contrast, Cady does no real soul-searching because her anger is presented as slapstick. (Interestingly, the ’80s teen classic
Heathers, Mean Girls’
obvious precursor, did involve anger erupting into murder yet was also billed as a comedy.)
Despite all this, the mean-girls craze may have opened the door for a cultural discussion about the importance of female friendship. Talking
about what girls will put up with for friendship—pursuing it with a passion previously ascribed only to romantic relationships—can lead to a greater understanding of the crucial role that female friendships play in girls’ lives, as important as any romance. And tween/teen media featuring nonmean girls does thrive: The protagonists of popular TV shows like
Lizzie McGuire
and
That’s So Raven
value close female friends, and then there’s that thriving straight-to-video empire created by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. A T-shirt sold last summer at the tween chain Rave Girl made an even bolder statement: Emblazoned with “Hilary’s Best Friend” (referring to Hilary Duff), it’s a powerful counterpoint to those “Mrs. Kutcher” and “Mrs. Lachey” Ts that also made the rounds last year. Sure, there must be a lot of competition to be Hilary’s best friend, but it would be a joy comparable (or even superior) to wedding a pop idol.
Anti-mean-girls rhetoric sounds feminist because it’s nominally about empowering girls; but, once filtered through popular media, it doesn’t ask girls to explore their anger or aggression, nor does it address why they’re expected to be “nice”—and, more important, how being nice doesn’t always leave room for being smart, strong, capable, independent, or adventurous. What could’ve been a teen feminist movement, touching on some of the great unrecognized truths about life as a girl, ultimately became nothing more than a tired recapitulation of the good girl/bad girl game, with all its attendant moralism. The mean-girls debates could have helped transform the way teenage girls are encouraged to think and act toward each other. But in the end, all we got was another catfight.