tangleofrainbows:

bookhobbit:

switch-off-the-stars:

squidsqueen:

dw:

when did we replace the word “said” with “was like”

When it occured to us that “said” implies a direct quote, while “was like” clarifies that you mean to communicate the person’s tone and general point without quoting them word for word.

THANK YOU

because I’m both a smart alec and a linguistics nerd, I’m going to add that the answer is sometime before 1982, which is the OED’s earliest citation for the phrase. Given how long it takes for slang to make it to formally attested sources – or perhaps I should say how long it did take before the internet was widespread, given how much that’s changed how we can access new usages as they’re developing – I’m gonna say at least the 1970s. It was apparently, at the time, stereotypically associated with valley girls, because the first attestation is in a song called “Valley Girl”. 

By the way, the idea of having a word that implies a direct quote and one that implies an indirect quotation isn’t new – the older usage is “goes”. Like, “I told him I was angry, and he went [making exaggerated facial expression] ‘whaaat? why?’” This usage, apparently, can be traced back to Dickens.

So, really, we’re replacing ‘went’ with ‘was like’, not ‘said’.

for those of you who want more information about this, there’s an Actual Published Linguistics Paper here (you can read it there or download the pdf) about vernacular like. it turns out there are at least four uses of vernacular like, and only the quotative like can plausibly be traced back to valley girls in the 1980s; the other three uses (approximation, discourse marker, and particle) are at least a century older than that