The phrase that men never utter but women use dozens of times a day.

How many times a day would you start a sentence with “I just feel like…”?

How many times would “like” make an appearance in your vernacular? How many times would you abbreviate your words, speak with an upward inflection, and squeeze out those high decibels? (And can you even help it?)

How many times do you think you’d hear those same phrases from a bloke?

Yeah, almost never.

I live in a house of women. We make fun of ourselves by emphasising our (in a squeaky tone) “I just feel like…”, because we are aware we speak like this all the time. And we are not alone.

Women continuously use words that soften or weaken their position or opinion. Ultimately what they are doing is apologising for the content of what they’re saying. Before they’re even saying it.

We preface our thoughts with a “sorry but I…”, or a “sort of” or a “just” as if to say, “If you don’t agree with me, that’s fine, but can we still be friends?”

If you think about it, with all these language devices, you might agree that women are pretty easy to lampoon. (Cue abbreviation, upward inflection, insert like, hair flick, and high-pitched intonation. Read: cue, Ja’mie King. #amiright? )

And I mean, “like”, I guess “I just feel like” I’ve heard so many girls speaking in this way. Apologising for their thoughts, premising their ideas, (“I don’t know what you’ll think about this but…”) or ending their sentences with an upward inflection, (“Right?”). I begin to wonder: why are we all apologising for what we have to say?

Is this because women are being brought up on weak, apologetic language, which, though creative and imbued with social cues and meaning (yes, even though studies show young women are increasingly setting trends in terms of linguistic and vocal patterns), is still not certain of itself?

And if girls are being brought up like this, why is it only them? And does it even matter?

A friend tells me, “I remember being told so many times in High School debating, that I had to speak more authoritatively and not be intimidated by the boys and their deep unequivocal opinions.”

In the office, it’s not actually that different.

The boss of a Sydney-based marketing company tells me, “Women and men pitch me their ideas. Women say, ‘I’m sorry if you don’t think it’s good.’ Men say, ‘So I have this incredible idea.’ And often the women’s ideas are better. But off the cuff, whose idea am I going to want to hear?”

Have we women been socialised to express our opinions differently?

Katie J.M. Baker wrote in Jezabel some time ago about the “I just feel like” verbal tick. She spoke to Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at The University of Pennsylvania. He speculated on why women used the incessant “I just feel like” in their conversations and said:

“Female speakers want to “soften” their assertions somewhat more than male speakers do; or it could be because the overall frequency of the phrase is increasing, and female speakers are leading the change, as they often do”

So he noted two things, 1) that women are “softening” their assertions and 2) that female speakers often lead the change in linguistic patterns.

New York Times writer Douglas Quenqua echoes this same point. Quenqua said that “some linguists suggest that women are more sensitive to social interactions and hence more likely to adopt subtle vocal cues.” In other words we can identify setting, feelings, and respond appropriately.

A psychology student friend of mine stressed that she thinks; “women are very often concerned with the feelings”. She didn’t want to move into (pop?) psychology and classify men and women into thinkers and feelings. Yet she stressed that feeling and intuition was an issue of strength, and that women should be proud to have this foresight. They should be proud to be able to say “I just feel like” with intuition and sensitivity.

My friend expanded, telling me that often when she’s in university tutorial discussions, she hears the girls slam the tutor with a relevant and poignant point, and then “soften” it with a, “but I guess I’m not really sure, that’s really just my opinion”.

In brief, women tend to worry about their feelings first and make their point second.

My friend referred me to her studies, pointing to mood and emotion being a direct source of information for some people. We will ask people, “how do you feel about that?” unknowingly priming them to answer from their feelings.

Women draw information from their feelings or their mood. And this isn’t ideal when their mood is unreliable and varied.

So we shy away from making bold assertions. We retreat into our feelings and moods. We draw information from feelings, and beat around the bush with our point.

And part of this is wonderful. We are confident in expressing our emotions. We are sensitive to our environments and able to identify our feelings. Yet a lot of the time, emotions don’t need to be involved. But we will still draw them in.

Maybe it’s time to learn to be forthright and unashamed about what we have to say. And, take the fact that we are emotionally intelligent in our stride.

And on the plus side, linguistics argue that it’s the women who are ahead of the bell curve by pioneering language . They are at the forefront of creating vocal trends. Girls are redefining the way people speak. New York Times said that girls deserved props for, “pioneering vocal trends and popular slang … in much more sophisticated ways than people tend to realize.” So, ah #quiche… anyone?

Overall though, this “I just feel like…” is making us less effective in terms of communicating our thoughts and ideas. We discredit ourselves before we even begin. And often we actually deserve that credit.

So we are original, creative, emotionally intelligent and environmentally aware. Even though we might express it in abbreviations, self-referential idioms or uptalk. The question we should really ask is, why should we be apologising for it?

No damn reason at all.

Emma Froggatt is a writer, a Masters student and an intern at Mamamia. You can follow her on twitter here.

Do you speak like this? Do you think women are dancing around from saying what they really think? Do you think men speak differently? Do you know why you do it? Do you even think you need to stop?