"like" avoidance/correction

[Baker, John]

        MWDEU notes the hypercorrective tendency of some writers to
avoid "like" even as a preposition.  For a long prepositional phrase
like this one, it isn't surprising that Ifill, who had no time to stop
and analyze it, might momentarily have supposed it to be a clause.  Also
note that Ifill started with the unidiomatic "like with," presumably
because she had been undecided whether to say "like" or "as with."  She
wanted to correct that usage, and "as with" was the easier correction.


John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Matthew Gordon
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007 5:16 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: "like" avoidance/correction

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

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