Quotative "like"

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:59 AM -0500 1/13/01, Alice Faber wrote:
>I forget who gave the paper on this at the ADS/LSA meeting last week, and
>my program is at the lab. But there's a lovely example of quotative "like"
>in tomorrow's NY Times Magazine Section, in an interview with Doris Kearns
>Goodwin. Here's the context, with punctuation:
>
>"Someone was talking to people who had watched me, and they were like,
>She's the one with the normal hair. Which means that it was sometimes
>sticking out."
>
>The interview's on page 15.
>
>I'm not sure exactly how old Goodwin is, but, she's old enough to have been
>traumatized when the Dodgers left Brooklyn, which would make her at least
>50.

I seem to recall (from evidence provided in her book about growing up
in Rockville Centre and bleeding for the Brooklyn Dodgers) that she's
pretty much my age, 55, give or take a year.  She's probably just
been around a lot of Gen-Xers, her own or others.  Of course, I have
too, and I rooted just as hard for the Brooklyn Dodgers as she did,
and yet "be like" is likely to remain trapped in my passive
vocabulary.  But that's me.

larry