This Is, Like, The Most Annoying Criticism Of Women – And It Just Happened Again

Following a decisive election night for numerous Democrats earlier this month, a clip from one winning candidate’s team received criticism online for a surprising reason.

And it has a lot less to do with what she was actually saying, than how she was saying it.

“The bed-wetting that happens in our party has got to stop. Like, the Republican side, while their candidate was, like, continuing to underperform and frankly, like, lose on things that he should’ve been winning on,” Alex Ball, the newly appointed chief of staff to New Jersey Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill, said in conversation with Crooked Media’s Tommy Vietor.

“They were so rock solid in their support of him on Twitter, on Fox News, in the New York Post, they were so aligned,” Ball continued. “And I get who owns all those media sources — and it’s, like, all the same people, and we don’t have that luxury — but I will just say, we, our enthusiasm could’ve taken off a bit more if people in our own party stopped being ‘unnamed strategists’ who wanna talk about all the issues we’re having.”

“OMG, she sounds like a Valley Girl. Like, ’ya know like, seriously – a throwback,” one commenter said. Another was concerned that Ball, as New Jersey’s “most powerful unelected official, uses the word ‘like’ approximately 1,500 times in this interview clip,” concluding, “We’re so screwed.”

For anyone who has lived through the various hand-wringing over vocal fry or uptalk, this critique won’t seem all that new. And if this feels like a conversation we have every few years when some brave soul decides to proudly stand up and confess that he actually finds the voices of women to be annoying? That’s because it is.

But linguistically and psychologically, why is it that some people find these words and this manner of speech to be a harbinger of the “screwed” nature of our intellectual and political futures? Like, is it really so bad for a conversational sound bite to sound conversational?

HuffPost reached out to some linguists and experts in communication to get a better idea of why the “likes” and “ums” perpetually draw this ire – and how we can connect with each other better when we understand why we actually use them.

First off, these ‘filler words’ don’t actually hint at incompetence or a lack of skill in........

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