"like," intrans.

[Jonathan Lighter]

Ah ! Bloody Mary !

  _South Pacific_  may well be the effective source.  After more than half a century, the beat goes on.

  JL


Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
Subject: Re: "like," intrans.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On 9/19/06, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> A new Macy's commercial stars "Stacy London, Fashion Expert."
[...]
> When Stacy sees ladies wearing Macy's fashions, she exclaims,
>
> "Oooooooh ! I like !"
>
> I can recall maybe forty years ago show-biz types on TV occasionally asked.
> "You like ?" The idea seemed to be they were mimicking street vendors in
> foreign lands, or maybe such vendors as played by the late J. Carroll Naish.

Not to mention Bloody Mary in "South Pacific": "You like? You buy?"

> The last time I heard "You like ?" was in the excellent Philip Seymour
> Hoffman flick, _Owning Mahowny_ (2003) when Hoffman's rich bookie asks
> him what he thinks of his (the bookie's) new car.

"I like" seems pretty common these days -- often repeated for
emphasis. See the many hits for "I like, I like" on Myspace:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:myspace.com+%22i+like+i+like%22

And then there are the mock-Chinese variants, "I likey" and "me
likey", both well-attested on the Web in both transitive and
intransitive uses.


--Ben Zimmer

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