Information about Like

Also see Like Cola

In English, the word like can be a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, preposition, particle, conjunction, hedge, interjection, and quotative.

Word history

As a preposition or adjective, it comes from the Middle English like meaning "similar", which in turn comes from Anglo-Saxon gelīc and Old Norse líkr. The verb "to like" came from Anglo-Saxon līcian. Both words may be related to Anglo-Saxon līc = "body", and are cognates of the modern German adjective "gleich" (=same, equal).

As a preposition used in comparisons

Like is one of the words in the English language that can introduce a simile. Examples:

• He eats like a pig.
• He has a toy like hers.

(Note: This last example is not a simile, which compares two dissimilar things. The fact that the toys are similar precludes this example from being a simile. "His toy spun like Fourth of July fireworks" would work because, although the toy and the fireworks are essentially different, the comparison helps explain how the toy moved.)

Similes can be contrasted with metaphors, which are phrases which say that something is something else when the intended meaning is that the two things are similar in some way:

• He was a pig yesterday. (Intended meaning: He ate like a pig yesterday.)

As a conjunction

Like is often used in place of the subordinating conjunction as or as if. Examples:

• He acts like a girl does.
• He acts as a girl does.
• They look like they don't want to go to school.
• They look as if they don't want to go to school.

Many people became aware of the two options in 1954, when a famous ad campaign for Winston cigarettes introduced the slogan "Winston tastes good — like a cigarette should." The slogan was criticised for its usage by prescriptivists, the "as" or "as if" construction being considered more proper. Winston countered with another ad, featuring a woman with greying hair in a bun who insists that ought to be "Winston tastes good as a cigarette should" and is shouted down by happy cigarette smokers asking "What do you want — good grammar or good taste?"

The appropriateness of its usage as a conjunction is still disputed, however. In some circles it is considered a faux pas to use like instead of as or as if, whereas in other circles as sounds stilted.

As a verb

Like can be used to express a feeling of attraction, weaker than love and distinct from it in important ways. In the case of a choice this is also called preference. Examples:

• I like her.
• They like Jane.
• I like traveling.

Many younger teenagers and children will use this term to refer to a crush by saying "like like" whereas "like" refers to as a friend, sometimes stressing the word instead of repeating it. Example:

• Do you "like" her or do you "like like" her?

Like is also used in the field of criminal justice to express that one thinks a suspect is possibly guilty of a crime. Example:

• I like John for that homicide.

As an adjective

Like can be used as an adjective meaning "similar". Example:

• Argon, neon, and like gases are inert.

As a noun

Like can be used as a noun meaning "preference" or "kind". Examples:

• We'll never see the like again.
• She had many likes and dislikes.

Valley speak and beatniks

The word like has several very common uses in informal speech. These uses of like are associated with Valley girls (which refers to teenage girls from the San Fernando Valley, a community in Los Angeles) in pop culture, as made famous through the song "Valley Girl" by Frank Zappa, released in 1982, and the film of the same name, released the following year. The stereotyped "valley girl" language is an exaggeration of the variants of California English spoken by younger generations. It is also used in the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange by the narrator as part of his teenage slang.

"I, like, didn't say anything."

However, nontraditional usage of the word has been around at least since the 1950s, introduced through beat and jazz culture. The beatnik character Maynard G. Krebs (Bob Denver) in the popular Dobie Gillis TV series of 1959-1963 brought the expression to prominence. The word finds similar use in Scooby Doo:

Shaggy: "Like, let's get outta here, Scoob!"

Such uses of the word like can now be found virtually everywhere English is spoken, particularly by young, native English speakers.

As an adverb

Like can be used as an adverb meaning "nearly" or to indicate that the phrase in which it appears is to be taken metaphorically. This is normally considered to be 'lazy' speech. Examples:

• I, like, died!
• They, like, hate you!

As a quotative

Like is sometimes used as a verbum dicendi to introduce a quotation or paraphrase, especially if the quote is being recited from short-term memory and therefore may or may not be exact. If the speaker changes his or her voice to impersonate the person who said the quotation, it is probably in exact words. As in the examples below, Like for this usage is always joined with a "to be" verb (was, were, is etc).

Examples:

• She was, like, no way!
• He was like, I'll be there in five minutes.
• He was like [speaker's voice deepens], "you need to leave the room right now!"

Like can also be used to communicate a pantomime, or to paraphrase an explicitly unspoken idea or sentiment:

• I was like [speaker rolls eyes].
• I was like, who does she think she is?

Sometimes used to introduce non-verbal quotations. For instance, facial expressions, or even miming whole-body actions (tripping, walking into something) by use of hand gestures.

See Golato (2000) for a similar quotative in German.

As a hedge

Like can be used to indicate that the following phrase will be an approximation or exaggeration, or that the following words may not be quite right, but are close enough. Examples:

• I have, like, no money.
• The restaurant is, like, five miles from here.

As a discourse particle or interjection

Like can also be used in much the same way as um... It has become a trend among North American teenagers to use the word like in this way.(see Valspeak, discourse marker, and speech disfluency):

• I, like, don't know what to do.

It is also becoming more often used (Northern England and Hiberno-English in particular) at the end of a sentence, as an alternative to you know:

• I didn't say, like, anything.

See Fleischman (1998) for a similar discourse particle in French.

test

As a way to use an onomatopoeia as a verb

For example, "It was like, boom!" can be substituted for "It exploded!" Often used with exuberance. Extremely casual. Often combined with non-verbal elements.

External links

• Article on possible linguistic and social uses
• Sources on like

Bibliography

• Andersen, Gisle. (1998). The pragmatic marker like from a relevance-theoretic perspective. In A. H. Jucker & Y. Ziv (Eds.) Discourse markers: Descriptions and theory (pp. 147-70). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Andersen, Gisle. (2000). The role of the pragmatic marker like in utterance interpretation. In G. Andersen & T. Fretheim (Ed.), Pragmatic markers and propositional attitude: Pragmatics and beyond (pp. 79). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Blyth, Carl, Jr.; Recktenwald, Sigrid; & Wang, Jenny. (1990). I'm like, 'say what?!': A new quotative in American oral narrative. American Speech, 65, 215-227.
• Buchstaller, Isabelle (2004). The sociolinguistic constraints on the quotative system. British English and US English compared. PhD thesis. University of Edinburgh.
• Buchstaller, Isabelle (2006). Globalization and Local Reappropriation: The case of the Quotative System. Christa Dürscheid, Jürgen Spitzmüller (Eds.). Trends and Developments in Youth Language Research. Frankfurt: Lang.
• Buchstaller, Isabelle (2006). Social Stereotypes, Personality Traits and Regional Perceptions displaced: Attitudes towards the “new” quotatives in the UK. Journal of Sociolinguistics.
• Cukor-Avila, Patricia. (2002). She say, she go, she be like: Verbs of quotation over time in African American Vernacular English. American Speech, 77 (1), 3-31.
• Dailey-O'Cain, Jennifer. (2000). The sociolinguistic distribution of and attitudes toward focuser like and quotative like. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4, 60–80.
• Ferrara, Kathleen; & Bell, Barbara. (1995). Sociolinguistic variation and discourse function of constructed dialogue introducers: The case of be+like. American Speech, 70, 265-289.
• Fleischman, Suzanne. (1998). Des jumeaux du discours. La Linguistique, 34 (2), 31-47.
• Golato, Andrea. (2000). An innovative German quotative for reporting on embodied actions: Und ich so/und er so 'and I’m like/and he’s like'. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 29–54.
• Jucker, Andreas H.; & Smith, Sara W. (1998). And people just you know like 'wow': Discourse markers as negotiating strategies. In A. H. Jucker & Y. Ziv (Eds.), Discourse markers: Descriptions and theory (pp. 171-201). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Miller, Jim; Weinert, Regina. (1995). The function of like in dialogue. Journal of Pragmatics, 23, 365-93.
• Romaine, Suzanne; Lange, Deborah. (1991). The use of like as a marker of reported speech and thought: A case of grammaticalization in progress. American Speech, 66, 227-279.
• Ross, John R.; & Cooper, William E. (1979). Like syntax. In W. E. Cooper & E. C. T. Walker (Eds.), Sentence processing: Psycholinguistic studies presented to Merrill Garrett (pp. 343-418). New York: Erlbaum Associates.
• Schourup, L. (1985). Common discourse particles: "Like", "well", "y'know". New York: Garland.
• Siegel, Muffy E. A. (2002). Like: The discourse particle and semantics. Journal of Semantics, 19 (1), 35-71.
• Taglimonte, Sali; & Hudson, Rachel. (1999). Be like et al. beyond America: The quotative system in British and Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3 (2), 147-172.
• Underhill, Robert. (1988). Like is like, focus. American Speech, 63, 234-246.