This will try to be an unbiased observation. But, full disclosure, I hate like.
Nothing against the word itself… to approve of something, to like it, as facebook offers us. I have no problem with that. (Well, the facebook ‘like’ does discourage conversation and make things superficial, but that is what facebook does…but that’s another article.)
No, what I’m talking about is what conversations have become, we no longer “feel” or “say”, instead we “were like”.
It works for anything…
Surprised?
The “like” will work. My friend says he wrecked his car. I was like, What happened?
Or
Your friend has free tickets to the U2 concert and invites me.
I was like, Awesome.
Or it could be a response to a simple statement:
“I’m going to go get some Chinese food.”
I was like, I’ll go.
The origin of this phrase goes back to the Valley Girl speak most of us made fun of back in the 80s-90s. But over time, it has crept into everyday use. And when I hear a conversation of likes strung out together like rusty barbed wire, snagging at the flow of the conversation, it makes me, like, sick.
Maybe it’s a better way of filling space, like the uh, or um… but that’s debatable.
Maybe it’s a way of distancing our self away from our feelings. Instead of saying I think, I feel, we interject a like, so those feelings are easier to talk about at a distance.
And if you are “like” something, you don’t need to be exact. If someone says that didn’t happen, or that they didn’t say that, you can counter, “I never said you invited me home with you. I just said, you were LIKE that.”
Or maybe it’s just a saying that enough people use that it bothers me to write a blog about it.
arabedrossian.org 
That was like, totally… awesome like.
You’re like being sarcastic. Not sarcastic, but like it.
So, I was having lunch the other day. The sandwich I was eating was prepared so perfectly, that the ingredients seemed to have been invented specifically to compliment each other on my sandwich. I thought to myself “This is an awe inspiring sandwich”.
-or-
I was like “Holy shit, this sandwich is freaking AWESOME”
There are times where it is fitting while being used in the way you dislike. In comparing “like” with other means of description, I think there is something more conveyed than just your diction. Telling a story about a conversation for example, when you quote an answer of affirmative, you could say:
I said yes.
I agreed.
I replied yes.
Or you could say “I was like, hell yeah!” (while saying this, please hold your hands up enthusiastically, raise your eyebrows, and nod your head a few times)
If we look at common interactions where this form of “like” is used, I don’t think we would be incorrect if we stated that more than the majority are used in personal verbal interactions. This is opposed to written interaction (FB replies / fictional or real descriptions of conversations or events). We are story tellers. We tell these stories to excite the other party and share our lives with them. “Like” is evolving to mean “I said” and /or “behaved in this fashion”.
I do agree that it offers a interesting filter of misunderstanding in it’s not being exact though. It’s actually a nice tool to be able to exaggerate a little for the sake of the recipient of a story. “Ara was like, puking everywhere!” while he obviously could not be doing that… we all know Ara doesn’t eat that much.