"like" avoidance/correction

Matthew Gordon gordonmj at MISSOURI.EDU
Thu Apr 26 21:15:47 UTC 2007


On last night's Newshour, Gwen Ifill started a question with "like", then
self-repaired:
"Like with every other case - As with every other case we're looking at this
term, it seems that we are watching to see what Chief Justice Roberts
does..."
Only the corrected version appears in the transcript:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june07/campaignads_04-25.html

Is this a context where the traditional proscription of 'like' applies? I
thought it was its use as a conjunction that people objected to. Perhaps
partial recollection of the traditional proscription is combining with more
modern condemnation of "like" as a discourse marker stereotypically
associated with young (Californian) women to feed avoidance of likes of any
stripe in formal context. Almost certainly I'm not the first to suggest
this, and I'd welcome relevant citations as well as further examples.

I consider our local NPR station's use of "listeners such as you" in their
funding acknowledgments to be another case.

And, I recently found a more egregious example in a student paper:
"In my research into other libraries such as the Kemper Memorial Library, I
have made some observations..."
The Kemper Library is the church library at the local Newman Center, and
what the student meant is that she researched similar libraries in other
parishes.

-Matt Gordon

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list