The Soft Power of Like
Terms such as like and sort of are ways for English speakers to sound more polite.
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Episode Notes
How do you express politeness? There are the old standards, including please and thank you. But increasingly we rely on informality, profanity, and terms such as like and sort of to soften our speech and make us sound less blunt. Politeness can be remarkably complicated for modern English speakers.
Podcast production by Mike Vuolo.
