6 Likes, Liked and Disliked

Linda Hall writes in The Conversation about strategies for getting students to make less use of the hated monosyllable like. She cites (and admits that she respects) an essay by David Grambs, “The Like Virus,” in the August 2011 edition of The Vocabula Review, a subscription-only online periodical of linguistic peeving (it is reprinted in Exploring Language, edited by Gary Goshgarian, pages 303-310).

Grambs (could that be a clerical error for “Gramps” or “Grumps”?) doesn’t just hate young people, with their sloppy diction and sensitivity to fashion and openness to change; he resents having to breathe the same air as young people.

Grambs is (of course) a fan of Orwell’s overrated “Politics and the English Language.” Aping a dishonest rhetorical move of Orwell’s (see my “Orwell and the Not Unblack Dog”), he constructs a sentence absurdly replete with instances of like, and expresses the hope that memorizing it may inoculate you against the “like virus”:

Like, like as not, to tell it like it is, like Jane has no, like, liking for the like, likes of Dick, like it or not.

Clueless about grammatical analysis, Grambs is unwittingly confusing a slew of distinct words belonging to six different word classes. Let me review them.

1. Uncontroversially, there is a verb meaning “regard with approval,” illustrated by any color you like or Everyone likes Italian food.
2. There is a somewhat marginal noun with a range of different meanings such as “favored thing” (likes and dislikes); “equivalent” (We shall not see his like again); and “online records of favorable opinion” (My recipe for biscotti got 21 likes on Facebook!). Note also wiring and the like (= “wiring etc.”).
3. There is a predicative adjective meaning “similar to” that (most unusually for an adjective) takes an obligatory noun-phrase complement, seen in It was very like a clock. Notice that the adverb very is almost entirely restricted to being a modifier of an adjective. (In earlier centuries like could be attributive, with the meaning “similar to each other”; but phrases such as like poles repel are archaic now.)
4. There is also an odd predicative adjective use that introduces direct quotations in vivid descriptions of conversations and situations: So I was like, “What is this?” A sentence of the form I was like “X” is true if and only if the speaker either said X, or said something effectively equivalent to X, or had a reaction that might be expressed by X. It may be accompanied by a physical indication of the speaker’s subjective experience; in fact the quoted speech can be completely replaced by a grunt or shrug or other gesture.
5. There is a preposition used with two different kinds of complement:
   1. It expresses meanings of similarity or analogy in certain comparative constructions, taking either a comparative-clause complement (as in the famously controversial slogan Winston tastes good like a cigarette should) or sometimes a noun phrase or preposition phrase complement (as in Like hemophiliacs, gays were at higher risk, which doesn’t entail that gays are similar to hemophiliacs; or Smartphones have caught on like wildfire; or Edinburgh is crowded on New Year’s Eve, just like in the summer).
   2. It can also take a plain declarative subordinate-clause complement, as in Say it like you mean it, or Prince’s Tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999. This informal use is deprecated by conservative usage specialists, who claim that “like should not be used as a conjunction” (by which they mean “subordinating conjunction,” a traditional misanalysis of the prepositions that take subordinate-clause complements: see my “Being a Preposition”).
6. Finally, in its most-hated use it is an interjection, as in It was, like, incredible! or It’s not as if I’m going to, like, flee the country. This is not nearly as recent as Grambs and his ilk believe (it has been tracked back to the 1920s). Nor is it slovenly or harmful. Semantically it hedges the following expression slightly, acknowledging that it might not be precisely correct, and there could be alternative ways of putting things. This is why John McWhorter’s New York Times article associates it with politeness.

These words all serve their various purposes well enough. Yet Grambs’s hostility to overuse of the interjection (and perhaps also the quotative adjective) seems to incline him to wage incoherent war on of them simultaneously. I have no idea why Linda Hall would tell her students that she respects this disagreeable crank; he should get a life.

Anyone antipathetic to the interjective or the direct-quotative uses of like should eschew them. I rarely use them myself. But I don’t waste neural activity on hating them, or despising the people who do use them, or trying to get such people to stop.