I feel like I'm thinking.

In a contributed op-ed for The New York Times on April 30, Molly Worthen presents a self-described “curmudgeonly plea to stop saying ‘I feel like’ all the time.” Worthen is a historian and assistant professor at UNC Chapel Hill, where she often hears students position their arguments behind that opening phrase. Worthen criticizes the phrase as “an absolutist trump card [that] halts argument in its tracks.” While her criticisms are solidly presented – apparently supported by one hundred percent of the linguists and other academics she interviewed – in the course of 1400 words she finds no time for nuance, and instead presents a view just as absolutist and argument-halting as the phrase she condemns.

As an engineer trained to idolize objectivity, Worthen’s piece does ring true for me, albeit in a rather shallow way. You can get away with saying almost anything if it’s prefaced by those three words “I feel like.” Something outlandish, baseless, or even demonstrably false – I can’t attack any of it, because to do so would be to attack the speaker and her feelings. And so those three words come to be the ultimate shield for lazy, imprecise, and selfish thinking. Particularly in the university setting, where we gather to discover and confront different ways of thinking, a catch-all way of saying “I’m not really going to engage substantively, and there’s nothing you can do about it” is especially problematic.

This is why history majors frustrated me to no end as an undergraduate. It seemed like they couldn’t really say anything about anything. But of course it’s not just history majors, and it’s not just UNC Chapel Hill. Worthen correctly notes that this language is now ubiquitous. In fact, one linguist ironically observes “I feel like the emotions have long since been mostly bleached out of [the phrase] ‘feel that.’ ” This phrase is just one droplet in the wave of political correctness that is washing over campuses across the country, drowning out tough but important conversations of all sorts.

But that’s just one narrative. And sadly that’s where Worthen’s thinking appears to halt.

I would argue that there are at least three other dimensions to the phrase “I feel like” that require consideration. The first comes directly from my own experience. I use those three words myself a fair bit, but typically not in the way discussed by Worthen. Rather, I use them in sentences such as “I feel like this algorithm structure would be less efficient” or “I feel like we’re not adequately addressing the interests of X” or “I feel like we’ve drifted from our original objective.” I choose the word feel deliberately in these cases, because I haven’t yet had sufficient time to think. I am relaying a cloudy but compelling intuition. The purpose of these statements is not to stifle conversation, but to promote it, using the only language available to me in that moment. Subsequently, I will probably move on to think statements, once they are more appropriate.

Second, we need to consider the situation we put undergraduates in that compelled them to embrace this linguistic crutch in the first place. It can be an intimidating thing for an eighteen or nineteen year old to be expected to discuss the origins of the First World War or the importance of net neutrality in a place of higher learning – especially if they feel disconnected from their peers and professors. Imagine a student, having only read a third of the required material, unsure what everyone expects of her, but knowing that her success depends in large part on her participation. Is it really any surprise that she starts to describe her view with the words “I feel that”? Sure, it’s a bad rhetorical habit. But to focus on that phrase as the most pressing problem in that situation is akin to saying “the homeless need to work on their manners before anything else.” It’s just a bit unreasonable.

Now, of course, there are many people for whom it’s not unreasonable to expect tightened language. In fact, the majority of “I feel like” utterances could, I suspect, be avoided with perfect mindfulness. But this raises the third consideration I want to highlight, and Worthen touches on it by proclaiming that “when new verbal vices become old habits, their power to shape our thought does not diminish.” I wish this claim were supported by something, but it’s not. It just floats, wishfully. Call me crazy, but I believe that as language naturally evolves, the way it shapes our thought evolves too. Worthen, however, appears to suggest here that shifting Latin expressions 2500 years ago continue to haunt our daily lives. To put it bluntly – yeah, we say “I feel like” more often now, but changes like this are bound to happen. Deal with it. If “feel” takes the place of “think” in a particular context, then another word or words will gradually take the place of “feel”. Plus, it’ll give the linguists something to talk about.

In searching for a larger purpose to justify her curmudgeonly plea, Worthen reveals her weakest arguments. She vaguely warns that “this quest to understand and cope with our own feelings and desires — the current term of art is ‘self-care’ — can lead to what the writer Christopher Lasch called ‘pseudo-self-awareness.’” Even leaving aside the apparent ignorance and derision of self-care, it is clear that by this point, Worthen is simply running on fumes. She relays a complaint about “relativism run rampant” and uses Christopher Lasch to outlandishly suggest that trying to “find a meaning in life” makes one a narcissist. Worthen does all this without any substantive grounding in theory or evidence. By the end, her shallow criticism of the phrase “I feel like” has given way to a hastily constructed and poorly veiled missive on how her students make her feel.

In an effort to be more substantive and constructive, I will now leave Worthen be and reflect more broadly on the three main points I've made so far. First, there is clearly a multidimensional range of thoughts that people can have – they vary in terms of the time required to produce them, the amount of evidence and confidence involved, the role emotion played, the importance of the thought to the person, and so on. Accordingly, we need a range of terms in order to have any hope of communicating our thoughts appropriately. Included in that range are the words know, think, believe, suspect, wonder, and feel. Second, we must recognize that there are also a range of social contexts and backgrounds in which these conversations take place. These factors are similarly essential to understanding how and why certain language is or should be used. Finally, I point out that there is also temporal variation. I speak quite differently than my parents and professors, and that is not necessarily an undying vice that disables thought. It just means that I think differently. And you know, I might feel differently too.