Anyone interested in the use of “like” as a discourse marker (“He was like, ‘No way!'”) might want to investigate this bibliography (found at P. Kerim Friedman’s academic blog; his general site is here, and apparently you have to click on “Academic” under “My Other Blogs” in the left column—the URL is the same).
Addendum. There is a discussion going on at Avva about the closest Russian equivalent of “like,” with Anatoly plumping for так (tak, ‘so’) or такой (takoi, ‘such’) and others preferring типа (tipa, ‘of the type’); older generations would have used мол (mol).
What about “to go” and “to be [all]?” To wit:
-> “Then Brenda went ‘what are talking about?”
-> “So I was all, ‘okay’, and he was all, ‘fine, then.”
Yes, I too would like to see a roundup of the various quotatives; anybody know of one?
Wow, I just found this old post… One reason I moved to Movable Type was that I couldn’t fix the link problem (caused by using a URL forwarding service). But, FYI, here is the direct link to that post.