Jon Pretty

One of the hardest most unexpected things about coming back to the US: Realizing how much Americans overuse the word "like." Listening to some girls talk, and they're averaging over 4 uses of the word "like" per sentence. How did we end up doing this to the English language?

It's, like, not just girls who do this...

No, like, you're totally right. Like totally.

I actually* started adding more "likes", "kindas" and "sortas" to my speech to try to sound more natural amongst normal people, in the hope of hiding my eccentricity... * though saying "actually" too much comes naturally to me

I do hate when you watch a talk you gave and notice you had a habit of saying "phrase x" wayyy to often. I went through like 3-4 phases of bad habits... "Um", "right", "like", etc.

I wonder what words I overuse in English … probably "so".

A lot of German speakers seem to use for word "exactly" too much when speaking English, for reasons which are easy to work out.

I can't work it out. Why?