“I Feel Like”: This Has to Stop

I quite consciously use "I feel like" to mark lowish confidence statements based primarily on fuzzy intuition or perception ("I feel like it's less work to move my eyes from side to side than up and down").

Contrast with "I think", which I think is more appropriate for statements with at least some deliberate thought behind them, or involve more concrete propositions ("I think Brand X hardware is unreliable", "I think it was last Wednesday").

So the author's example of "I feel like that would look better in blue" looks like a perfectly cromulent use of the phrase to me. If it's mostly a gut feeling about a subjective perception, why not use language that disclaims it as such? Apparently he feels that the disclaimer serves to shield the speaker from disagreement, but I'd have to disagree with him on that.

Linguistic prescriptivism is a worthless endeavor. More effective -- and this article touched on it briefly -- is working to foster an enviroment where the people who use the phrase "I feel" are encouraged to state their opinion boldly. The comment about how the phrase is used more often by women is intuitive. Women are more likely to use 'hedging,' to avoid or de-ecscalate conflict, most likely because their position is less often authoratative to the speaker (especially in the workplace). It's also more common for many minorities, who have lived their life with the implict agreement that their presence there is tenuous.

Telling a person that they way they speak is 'wrong' without idenifitying the reasons they might be speaking that way is a lazy form of criticism.

I don't see an alternative being offered in this article; should people say instead

“I believe Republicans hate poor people.”

or maybe

"It is my opinion that Republicans hate poor people."?

It would seem the author is suggesting that instead I should say, "Republicans hate poor people." Now I have changed the statement from an opinion to a fact. While I would not say "I feel that two plus two is four", since this is not an opinion, "I feel like" in modern English is commonly used as one method of indicating your opinion.

Also by "softening" with a "this is my opinion" style phrasing we indicate that we are not close minded, but rather we are open to having an intelligent discussion surrounding the opinion, and thus open to learning and persuasion if presented with evidence that counters our opinion.

YES! Thank you, Brian, for writing this up. I loathe that phrase, it grates on my nerves every time I come across it, and I've been noticing it more frequently too.

When writing or speaking, I usually use "I think" instead -- if I don't have some kind of factual statement to make at the ready -- but that seems off-putting to the "I feel like" people.

I have a slightly less charitable opinion of the motivations behind "I feel like" that you partly touched on: because feelings are supposed to be unassailable, "I feel like" allows someone to state their opinion without fear of having to back it up with any kind of consideration, so people get to say silly things with equal or even greater weight of less silly things. "I feel like Mitt Romney would be a bad President" doesn't invite quite the same argument that "Mitt Romney would be a bad President" does.

I understand using different statements like, "I feel like", "I can see that", etc can be used strategically depending on the listeners personality. If they're a touchy-feely person, use "I feel like", if they're a visual person, use "I can see that", etc.

Not much science behind this, but it's a common sales technique. Using words like "feel" makes the statement feel (heh) more personal. Depending on the environment this might benefit the person making the statement.

Interestingly, according to the Google Ngram search, the phrase "I know" has also had an uptick since the 1980's.[1]

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=I+know&case_in...

Also interesting: it's like.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=it%27s+like&ca...

Even more dramatic rise than "I feel like".

I wish very long articles were accompanied with two paragraph text summaries.

Quite often i am interested in subject and know for a fact that the essence of it fits in two paragraphs, although I do not have 1/2 hour to read it in a whole.

"I have a theory that this phrase truly took hold in the feel-good, self-esteem driven, sharing-is-caring educational environment that permeated the 90’s childhood."

Is saying "I have a theory" really that much different than saying "I feel like"?