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I like like, likely more than you like likely.

Posted by halfnote (A) on July 7, 2008 at 20:05:28

In Reply to: Watched, like, this movie like, last night -- A Clockwork Orange. posted by clarkjohnsen on July 7, 2008 at 08:12:00:

The word, or to put it more accurately, this morpheme, "like", has a rather fascinating history in the our language.

It seems to us, like, a debasement of our elegant modern English usage to insert this morpheme into our sentences as we do, and as you have observed in "Clockwork Orange." Is it a sympton of our modern willingness to live with abiguity, since we see no need to be absolutely definitive about anything but are comfortable to approximate our ideas and observations with concepts which only need to be "like" what we mean, and not actually WHAT we mean? Is it a symptom of the degeneration of our vocabulary? A by-product of the decreased literacy and devotion to reading we see in our younger generations? Is it is harbinger of a further devolution and decline of the English speaking world, or of Western Civilization?

Perhaps Kubrick and Burgess thought so, in the thematic context of "Clockwork Orange." Alex's parent are, "like" parents, but not quite what we think of as parents from our detached, intellectually superior viewpoint. Alex's Droogs are, "like" friends, aren't they? And Alex and his friends nightly exertions are all efforts to have, "like" fun, aren't they?

"CO" is one of the great cinematic achievements of the second half of the 20th Century, in my opinion. Its stage sets, its props, its locations, its costumes, its directorial virtuousity -- in the use of stills, fast-motion, slow-motion, and music -- it audacious presentation of violence and depravity in a manner that is at once blood-curding and comic, its horrific cynicism about the machinations of politicians and society and their feckless efforts to subdue human nature, are all noteworthy in themselves; but, in terms of the ultimate ambitions and achivements of this film, they are, like, a "like."

Oops! I guess I have digressed! I MEANT to talk about the colloquial use of the word "like" and I actually started talking about "Clockwork Orange."

But, as I began to say, the word, or more precisely, the morphene, "like" has had an interesting history in the English language. You see, it has freqently been misused and abused. In fact, hundreds of years ago, during a period in our language's development known as "Middle English" (linguistic scholars, please correct me if it was "Early English" instead), people misused "like" exactly as they do today -- but with one important distinction.

Today, we would say, "That was, like, quick."

In the old days, we would have said, "That was quick, like."

The practice of using "like" in this manner became so pervasive that people actually began to slur it, to short-cut the hard pronunciation of the word "like" so that it became foreshortened as the more easily pronouced "li", which we spell today as "ly."

So, over time, this misuse of the word "like" actually became incorporated into regular proper usage: "quick, like" became "quickly", "intelligent, like" became "intelligently"; and so, the practice of inflecting adverbs with an "ly" was born.

Is this, like, more than you wanted to know about "like"?

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Kimber Kable

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