Just in case you still haven’t noticed or just didn’t care, two versions of the so-called “quotative like” have, for good or ill, forcefully insinuated themselves into the English language over the last 25 years. As reported by
Boston Globe correspondent Britt Peterson in the paper’s January 25, 2015 issue, “The use of ‘I’m like’ or ‘he was like’ to introduce a quote, a thought, or a feeling has spread through English worldwide, from Jamaica to New Zealand,” becoming one of most popular methods in English of talking about talking. On top of this, African American English or AAE has also adopted what Peterson describes as “an even less by-the-book variation”—”She/He/They be like”—where “be” overrides all of its inflections for case in the third person.
ILLUSTRATION FROM THE BOSTON GLOBEPeterson reports: “In American English, ‘I’m like’ conveys giddiness, casualness, youth—but not exactly ambition or polish. Movies and TV shows from ‘Clueless’ to ‘New Girl’... have used it to suggest these traits. Meanwhile, the African-American version, ‘I be like,’ shows up in song lyrics… and Internet memes, but it would surely be an example of the ‘regional expressions or informality’ warned against in a recent article about ‘Sloppy Speech Habits’ on the job-hunting site monster.com.”
Despite the prevalence of their usage, “I’m like” and “I be like” are predictably still stigmatized as informal or even incorrect because of their jarring syntax. Still, Peterson observes, “linguists see these expressions as something like the Swiss Army knives of reported conversation. Their versatility and usefulness means they’ll probably be around for a long time.”
Read Britt Peterson’s “Linguists are like, ‘Get used to it!’” in The Boston Globe now!INTERESTING RELATED READING:In “Panic at the Dictionary,” an article that came out in the January 30, 2015 issue of
The New Yorker, Stefan Fatsis reports about a recent “cultural jihad” mounted by a profoundly alarmed group of writers headed by novelist Margaret Atwood against the expunging by the
Oxford Junior Dictionary (2007, 2012 editions) of several dozen nature-related words, among them “almond,” “blackberry,” “minnow,” and “budgerigar.” The protesters also objected to the adding in their stead of words from technology such as “blog,” “chatroom,” “database”; from politics and economics, such as “democratic,” “euro,” “interdependent”; and from modern life, such as “bilingual,” “dyslexic,” “bungee jumping.” They argued that the
Junior Dictionary “should address these (deletion and substitution) issues and that it should seek to help shape children’s understanding of the world, not just to mirror its trends.”
Read Stefan Fatsis’s “Panic at the Dictionary” in The New Yorker now!
