If you have a large vocabulary and a good grasp of the rules of English grammar, why would you ever need to resort to slangy terms to make yourself understood?

Maybe because speech is more than just the literal content

carried by the words. It often conveys how the speaker feels and how the speaker expects to be

perceived, which is one reason the word like is everywhere in modern speech, even as many

sticklers profess to despise it. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd.

I'm not talking about like in the classic sense of I like dogs or she looks just like her sister

or even about the ubiquity of the like as a marker of approval in social media. Rather,

the ways many of us use this little word in creative ways like a thousand times a day.

And although we've been told it can make a sound indecisive and not so bright,

my guest believes it is not just defensible but often indispensable when we're trying to get a point across.

Megan C. Reynolds is editor at Dwell Magazine and author of the new book, Like,

a history of the world's most hated and like misunderstood word. Megan, welcome to think.

Hi, thank you for having me. You would not need to defend the way you and many of us use

like if you hadn't felt attacked for it in the first place. So who gets spun up about this word?

In my research and anecdotally over the course of writing this book, it has been honestly,

primarily older men are the ones who I have heard, you know, say it's not this word is you,

not that this word is useless, but, you know,

cut this word from your speech, you'll sound smarter if you do so. It's not proper to say like

all the time in the ways that we do that are bad. So yeah, it's largely men, which is was not

surprising to me in any capacity.

What seems to bother purists is the use of like as an informal interjection.

And I look this up.

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