"like" and "as if"

[Jonathan Lighter]

In my bemused observation of New York's hippie subculture in the early '70s, I noticed "spade" being used by white guys as a very positive term.  Far-out radical wannabes (a word not known then) said it.  It was the only slang synonym for "black person" that could be so used, and my impression was that it must have been picked up from usage by Stokely Carmichael or H. Rap Brown, though that was only a guess.

I never met a black hippie.

JL

Wilson Gray <wilson.gray at RCN.COM> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: "like" and "as if"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Jun 23, 2005, at 9:31 PM, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
> Subject: Re: "like" and "as if"
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> On Thu, 23 Jun 2005 16:56:55 -0700, Jonathan Lighter
> wrote:
>
>> Back in those days, the introductory "like" was customarily followed
>> by
>> a comma, as there was almost always a slight pause between it and what
>> followed. Of course, _Mojo Navigator_ may have been less
>> punctilious.
>
> Like, I think the comma is/was most often used when introducing a
> sentence-initial clause, but like if it's mid-sentential then the comma
> would often be dropped.
>
> Mid-sentential examples from _Mojo Navigator_:
>
> -----
> At ten o'clock they started to serve drinks and the older crowd would
> come
> in, and like they’re white-collar drunks and all...a bad scene.
> ("Big Brother & the Holding Company", Sep. 1966)
> -----
> The only other blues clubs are in the South Side, and like you just
> don't
> go down there unless you have a spade

FWIW, Richie Havens is the only spade that I've ever heard use the word
"spade" to mean "spade": "I bet you didn't know that there were spade
cowboys, did you?" A rhetorical question asked on a TV show as he was
about to sing some Western ditty.

Then there was the time that I asked a friend at UC Davis please not to
refer to spades as "spades," especially when she was talking to a
spade, at least. She replied that, at her no-doubt lily-white high
school in her no-doubt lily-white town somewhere in the
Northern-California wine country, it was customary to refer to spades
as "spades." After pondering this for over 35 years, I still haven't
been able to winkle out the logical connection between my request and
her reply to it. Clearly, talking to her was like talking to a wall, to
coin a phrase. She just didn't get it.

-Wilson Gray

> friend with you.
> ("Big Brother & the Holding Company", Sep. 1966)
> -----
> I always used to sip my mother's beer, so like I started playin' right
> then and just listened to all the different music around the country.
> ("Country Joe and the Fish", 22 Nov. 1966)
> -----
>
> Here's commaless "like" in both initial and medial position:
>
> -----
> Like you go to the Avalon now and you'll see... it used to be like
> just a
> small group of people in front that were listening and then like 90% of
> the audience was running around and dancing...and now like almost the
> whole auditorium is covered with sitting people, and it's, I think,
> considered uncool to freak out.
> ("Interview with the Doors", Aug. 1967)
> -----
>
> But elsewhere in the same article initial "like" gets a comma:
>
> -----
> Like, they're really good musicians, and they're tight, but so's Wilson
> Pickett, you know?
> ("Interview with the Doors", Aug. 1967)
> -----
>
> I think the magazine staff punctuated however they, like, liked.
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>


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