Qualifying an Argument of Diss 'Like'.
In "The Chronicle of Higher Education--Diss 'Like' , " Ted Gup (2012) states that "No word has less meaning than 'like'(or says as much about what has become of education.)" In this statement, he means that "like" is not very meaningful, but is popular nowadays because many people, especially young people, including students use "like" in their daily conversations so often. To make this point, he suggests that when people use "like" to connect two sentences, the sentences may be not very coherent. Besides, using abundant "likes" to replace pauses during a conversation, interlocutors tend to produce lots of blather. However, whether "like" should be meaningful is debatable. To what extent, this statement can be true? Precisely speaking, whether "like" is meaningful depends on its trend.
In Gup (2012)'s view, sentences next to "like" are usually blather. This means that "like" does not take up some real job in utterances. Besides, it is true that when people use "like", they may be unable to know what they are talking about. This can be interpreted into that "like" is not that meaningful. To some extent, Gup's point that "like" is meaningless is somehow true. Undoubtedly, when people do not have many things to talk about, in order to maintain a conversation, they often use a lot of "likes" to produce some utterances that are not relative to the previous statement. Especially among students, "like" is used so often. They often convey something that is meaningless, when they use "like". So I have to admit that "like" is meaningless when it produces blather.
Whether "like" is useful or not is more important than whether "like" is meaningful or not. Gup (2012) uses the term "meaning" to describe "like".