Every generation develops its own verbal tics that spread through conversation until they become so ubiquitous that most people stop noticing them.
Except, of course, for the people who do notice them, who tend to notice them constantly and with increasing irritation. The word “like” has been annoying grammarians and linguists for decades, but it’s far from alone. A whole ecosystem of filler words, redundant phrases, and speech habits has quietly colonised the way people talk, and the pushback is growing.
Some of these words are genuinely new. Others have been around in various forms for generations and simply resurface in different contexts. What they tend to have in common is that they add length without adding meaning, and once you start noticing them, it becomes very hard to stop.
“Like” has been irritating people since the 1980s and shows no signs of slowing down.
The use of “like” as a filler word, dropped into sentences where it serves no grammatical purpose whatsoever, is probably the most discussed speech habit of the last forty years. It began spreading through American youth culture in the 1980s, and has long since crossed every demographic and geographic boundary you might expect to contain it. Teenagers use it, adults use it, academics use it, and people who complain about other people using it usually use it themselves without realising.
What makes “like” particularly interesting linguistically is that it serves several different functions depending on context. Sometimes it introduces a reported thought or speech: “I was like, I can’t believe this.” Sometimes it hedges a statement: “It was, like, really cold.” Sometimes it genuinely appears to be doing nothing at all beyond filling a pause. Linguists have written extensively about its evolution from empty filler to a word with its own subtle grammatical function, though that nuance tends not to soften the irritation it produces in people who find it grating.
Starting every answer with “so” has become a reflex, especially in professional settings.
If “like” is the filler word of casual conversation, “so” has become its equivalent in professional and intellectual contexts. The habit of beginning an answer to a question with a heavily emphasised “so,” regardless of whether anything that follows actually connects to what came before, has spread through academic interviews, podcast conversations, TED talks, and business meetings at a remarkable pace.
The function it serves is similar to a throat-clear: it signals that the speaker is about to say something considered and structured, buying a fraction of a second to organise thoughts before the actual content arrives. The problem is that it quickly becomes a reflex rather than a deliberate choice, appearing at the start of answers where no such preamble is needed. Interviewees on Radio 4 are particularly noted for it, and for listeners who find it distracting, it can colour their perception of everything that follows.
“Absolutely” has replaced “yes” in a way that feels increasingly hollow.
Ask someone a yes or no question in a professional context and there’s a reasonable chance they’ll respond with “absolutely” rather than the simple affirmative the situation calls for. It started as a way of conveying enthusiasm and certainty, and in that original context it earned its place. But it’s now so widely deployed as a generic agreement word that it’s lost most of that force and become another form of verbal padding.
Customer service, in particular, has adopted “absolutely” so thoroughly that it now functions almost as a script. Spend any time on a customer helpline, and you’ll hear it deployed after every sentence you speak, regardless of what you’ve said, which is how a word originally meant to convey strong agreement becomes the verbal equivalent of nodding blankly. The same process has happened to “of course,” “certainly,” and “definitely,” all of which have been promoted beyond their natural usage until they mean approximately nothing.
“Going forward” and “at the end of the day” belong in a filler word hall of fame.
Business and management language has generated some of the most durable filler phrases in modern English. “Going forward” is perhaps the most notorious, used to mean “in future” but carrying an implication of decisive momentum that rarely matches the mundane context in which it appears. It became so common in corporate communication around the 2000s and 2010s that it developed its own parody status, yet it persists anyway.
“At the end of the day” is its peer in terms of longevity and redundancy. It appears most often before a statement that the speaker wants to present as a fundamental truth, but the phrase itself adds nothing to that statement beyond a slight air of world-weariness. Other contenders in this category include “the fact of the matter is,” “with all due respect” (usually deployed immediately before something disrespectful), and “if I’m being honest,” which implies that everything said before it may not have been.
“Literally” has been stretched so far it now means its own opposite.
Few words have had a stranger journey than “literally.” In its original usage, it means something actually happened in the precise sense described, as opposed to figuratively. It has now become so routinely used for emphasis in non-literal contexts that people say “I literally died laughing” or “I was literally frozen” without any awareness of the contradiction. The word is being used to signal intensity, where “really” or “absolutely” would do the same job.
Linguists point out that this kind of semantic change is entirely normal in the history of language. Words drift from their original meanings all the time, and the language survives. “Awful” once meant something that inspired awe. “Nice” once meant foolish or ignorant. The prescriptive argument that “literally” must always mean literally is historically shaky. But the prescriptivists have a point that when a word comes to mean both itself and its opposite, it loses a precision that was genuinely useful, and nothing quite fills the gap it leaves.
Uptalk and vocal fry have become shorthand for a whole set of anxieties about how people speak.
Beyond individual words, certain speech patterns have attracted their own share of criticism. Uptalk, the habit of ending statements with a rising intonation that makes them sound like questions, spread widely in the 1990s and has never really retreated. It tends to be associated with younger speakers and women in particular, which is part of why criticism of it often carries undertones that go beyond simple linguistics.
Vocal fry, the creaky lowering of the voice at the end of sentences, attracted similar criticism when it became widespread among younger women especially, with commentators arguing it made speakers sound bored or disengaged. Linguists tend to push back on both of these criticisms, noting that both patterns appear across many different demographics and serve real communicative functions. What tends to happen with speech habits associated with younger people and women is that they get labelled as lazy or unprofessional in ways that equivalent habits in older male speakers rarely do.
Language changes whether people like it or not, but that doesn’t mean anything goes.
Every generation has its list of speech habits that make older or more traditionally minded speakers wince, and every generation’s innovations eventually settle into the language and stop being remarkable. “You” was once considered an overly familiar form that proper speakers avoided. Double negatives were standard in Chaucer’s English. The idea of a fixed and correct version of English that existed before people started corrupting it is largely a myth.
That said, there’s a practical argument for being conscious of filler words and verbal habits that doesn’t require you to believe language is declining. Filler words slow communication down, dilute the impact of what you’re actually saying, and in professional contexts can undermine how others perceive your confidence and clarity. The goal isn’t to speak like a textbook, it’s to say what you mean without surrounding it with so much scaffolding that the meaning gets lost. Most people, if they listened back to a recording of themselves speaking, would find at least one habit they’d prefer to drop. The trick is noticing it, which is usually the hardest part.
