In law school, a prawf said something that stuck with me. I paraphrase here, as the original was quite sexist.

Children feel.
Priests believe.
Lawyers think.

John McWhorter writes about a shift in language usage that reveals how the distinctions above have been, and are being, lost.

A most interesting recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — examining what its authors describe as “the surge of post-truth political argumentation” — proposes that of late, English speakers and writers are more given to using intuition than reason.

Using Google’s Ngram Viewer, which traces the rates of usage of words and expressions in a massive corpus of books (and newspapers such as this one), the paper’s authors conclude that since around 1980, English speakers have been more given to writing about feelings than writing from a more scientific perspective. From around 1850 on, they found, the frequency of words such as “technology,” “result,” “assuming,” “pressure,” “math,” “medicine,” “percent,” “unit” and “fact” has gone down while the frequency of words such as “spirit,” “imagine,” “hunch,” “smell,” “soul,” “believe,” “feel,” “fear” and “sense” has gone up.

I’ve seen the same when it comes to law, as characterizations of court opinions and police encounters once framed in the objective language of reason are now often expressed in the language of emotion. A shooting is described in a newspaper article as “heartbreaking,” which is curious since it neither informs us of what happened or whether it was lawful, but of the writer’s feelings about it.

Do you care about the writer’s feelings about an event or do you want to know what happened? Some will argue that it can be both, although it’s unresponsive. You, the reader, will reach your own feelings about the event once you’ve been informed of the facts, and it may well be heartbreaking. But it’s neither more nor less heartbreaking because some reporter told you it was. Well, unless you rely on being told how to feel by reporters, which is possible for some of you.

But why have objective words been replaced by emotional words?

The authors associate their observations with what Daniel Kahneman has labeled the intuition-reliant “thinking fast” as opposed to the more deliberative “thinking slow.” In a parallel development, the authors show that the use of plural pronouns such as “we” and “they” has dropped somewhat since 1980 while the use of singular pronouns has gone up. They see this as evidence that more of us are about ourselves and how we feel as individuals — the subjective — than having the more collective orientation that earlier English seemed to reflect.

They conclude: “The universal and robust shift that we observe does suggest a historical rearrangement of the balance between collectivism and individualism and — inextricably linked — between the rational and the emotional.”

It’s unclear from this explanation why rational language relates to “collectivism” and emotional to “individualism,” which appears in this usage to mean the endemic narcissism that makes people believe their feelings important to the rest of the world. Don’t you want to know how I feel? Don’t you care? Where is your empathy for me?

They see the new way of using language as evidence of a kind of despair over sociopolitical conditions, necessitating a rather forlorn clinging onto one’s own impressions out of a lack of anywhere else to grab hold. While they concede that causes for the trend they observe are “difficult to pinpoint,” they posit that one reason we use more subjective language now could be due to “tensions arising from neoliberal policies which were defended on rational arguments, while the economic fruits were reaped by an increasingly small fraction of societies,” as we suffer the “negative effects of the use of social media on subjective well-being.” Further, they write, “If disillusion with ‘the system’ is indeed the core driver, a loss of interest in the rationality that helped build and defend the system could perhaps be collateral damage.”

Intuitive language is a blight in itself, which eschews standardized rules in favor of whatever common usage prevails such that it’s entirely  linguistically acceptable for each of us to have our own humpty-dumpty version of what words and phrases mean and not have the Tower of Babel fall on our heartbroken heads.

McWhorter, on the other hand, isn’t buying the argument that the “rearrangement” is about collectivism and individualism.

So, the drift from “all about that” to “all about me” is ordinary. The question is: Why would this have happened to such an unusual extent since 1980? My money is less on angst than informality. English usage became less cosseted after the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, to the point that the time traveler to America a century ago would find it a major adjustment to grapple with how strictly general mores policed the formality of public speech and writing. Inherent to informality is being more open about the self, less withholding about the personal, more inclined to the intimate. To “let it all hang out” entails more words about feelings.

Blaming shifts on the 1960s is certainly groovy, but ignores that it was followed by the ’80s and ’90s when the counterculture spent more time wiping their babies’ bottoms and watching their stock portfolios. That people became “more open about the self” and “let it all hang out” may be, but doesn’t do much to distinguish the demise of rational language. When we talked about feelings, we used the word “feel.” That didn’t mean we stopped thinking. Or did it?

A keen example of how collectivism, as well as rationality, persists amid the informal is the colloquial usage of “like.” The conversational “like” strikes many as merely a messy hedge that The Kids use too much. But from the point of view of linguistic analysis, “like” is a subtle and even kindly thing. Hedging is but one of its functions.

Crossing interpersonal boundaries in this way, this usage isn’t individualistic; it’s collective, taking into consideration that others’ mental pictures may be different and trying to bring them closer to yours. And the common thread between the new prevalence of personal words and the myriad usages of “like” is informality.

Some of us would consider use of the word “like” an unfortunate tick, a means of avoiding the heartbreaking burden of communicating with a modicum of precision. Then again, as the renowned educational philosopher, Jeffrey Lewbowski, explained, “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”