This term implies that every word should have a meaning in order to make sentences consistent. Nevertheless, in reality, not every word has an obvious meaning, including "like", but people still use these vague words because these words can meet particular functions. For instance, the definite article "the" itself does not possess apparent meanings, but people use it widely to differentiate a specific item from a general category. In this way, "the" takes up an important job, but at the meantime, it also does not have obvious meanings. So whether a word is meaningful or not is not as important as whether a word is useful or not. Moreover, according to Douglas Quenqua (2012), the use of "like" in an utterance, obviously without meaning or certain syntactic function, but probably as emphasis, has been adopted into the Webster's New World College Dictionary, 4th Edition where the instance given is : "It's, like, hot." This adoption of " like" into the official dictionary also indicates that even without an explicit meaning, the utility of "like" is acknowledged by people, and thus "like" has become an indispensable part of people's daily language. Furthermore, "like" actually can meet some functions, such as filling up the pauses between sentences in order to avoid embarrassment. In this way, "meaning" or "meaningful" is not a proper term to describe "like"; whether "like" is useful or not is more important than whether "like" is meaningful or not.
Whether "like" is useful or not can be determined by its trend. The author Gup (2012) admits that using "like" was an extremely common and popular linguistic phenomenon among students, however he opposed them to use "like" everywhere. Gup (2012) had to force them not to use "like".