like

[Alexander Gross]

"Like" was definitely used in this manner in a circa-1900 Bram Stoker novel,
where it became clear from context that this was considered substandard
British English and/or criminal cant.  I would love to tell you the title,
but I either left the book in England or have it sitting in an attic 100
miles north of here.

What follows is not a "sociolinguistic study" or anything approaching
"science" but merely my own speculations:

I've sometimes wondered whether this use of "like," whether after a verb or
an adjective, could be something like an adverbial surrogate or a form on
its way to becoming an adverb.  Just as the basic forms of life are
continually re-evolving in the sea around us, could various stages of
evolving language forms also be in the process of reenactment?  After all,
where did the adverb suffix "-ly" come from anyway?  And why do we find the
adjective suffixes "-lich" and "-lijk" in German and Dutch?

Both so-called substandard English and standard German make their adjectives
double as  adverbs, but could there nonetheless be a shared feeling among
speakers that something might be missing?  Could the explanation for this be
found in a lost ancestor of several related  languages?

This is scarcely to suggest that adverbs represent any kind of linguistic
advance or that languages with an adverb for every adjective (which would
exclude English) are superior to those without this feature, rather it seems
interesting to note what may be a common conflict within a small group of
languages.

But why an adverb?  I would suggest that such speakers do not feel full
confidence in the words they use and thus feel the need for some kind of
qualification, even if they are not sure what form this qualification should
take.  And this comes out as "like."

A more persuasive adverbial surrogate is "wise," which is also sometimes
claimed as an Americanism.  As in "How are we doing supply wise?"

This is not quite off topic, since adverb-shunning Germans sometimes tack a
two- or three-syllable adverbial surrogate onto their nouns and adjectives,"
namely "-weise" or "-erweise."  Thus, the following structure:

Er hat uns sehr freundlicherweise erwaehnt, dass...

Could be translated into an extreme form of American English as:

He mentioned to us like real friendly wise that...

I recall a Royal Shakespeare actor friend making fun of Americans who talk
like this, his example was "the  owl who wasn't very wise wise-wise."

best to all,

alex