Essay of the Month
Like I said . . .”
Was it Winston Churchill - or, Bernard Shaw – or maybe Oscar Wilde – who first alleged that the United States and Britain are two nations divided by a common language?
The phrase has been variously attributed, even in the Oxford English Dictionary but regardless of its source, I am reminded of this division often: when, for instance, my jokes give rise to bewilderment rather than amusement or when I, in my turn, am puzzled by Americanisms rooted in baseball.
After more than forty years in America, a citizen since 1976, I still respond naturally to British terminology as though I live in England. I immediately understood “Sod the Lot!” when I read it and knew that it did not mean turn the bare earth into a lawn! It was the recent British elections ousting the Labor government that gave rise to the phrase, posted in various locations across England’s fair and pleasant land.
Sod, of course, derives from sodomy, although I suspect that few using the word think of that anymore than the F word raises pictures of copulation in the mind (or maybe it does?). I vividly recall my mother, in a spat with my dad, muttering “Go to buggery” – buggery being yet another copulative term used without apparent thought of its precise homosexual meaning. “Sod off!” and “bugger off” have their equivalents in American speech, and we all know what they are.
Language and its different usages have long fascinated me and I am fully aware that language is a living, changing system. Nonetheless. I continue to be dismayed as non-grammatical usages find their way into every-day English, seemingly actively promoted by those who surely know better. I have had to concede that “hopefully,” is here to stay, when “it is hoped” or “let’s hope” is intended. I still wince when I hear it or see it and just hope that it is never used by any of my past students. I gave it my best.
My current bête noire is “like,” used everywhere and all the time to mean “as though” or “as if.” Just today, I found it misused in the Financial Times, of all arbiters of careful usage, by a man who purports to be editor-in-chief of Monocle:
“. . . the two who have contorted themselves into such bizarre
shapes that they look like they’re auditioning for Cirque do Soleil.”
Had he written, for instance, “they look like tightly wound springs” or “they look like acrobats from the Cirque de Soleil,” or “they look as if they’re auditioning. . .” he would not have caused my heart to miss a beat.
I can hear readers groaning at what may seem like a triviality. After all, we know what he means, so why be so picky? Because it’s sloppy speech, that’s why! And sloppy speech distorts meaning and clarity.
Let’s assume that readers of the Financial Times are adults whose language skills were acquired long ago. They will recognize a misuse when they see it, accept it without much thought, or respond with a shudder, as I did. When, however, the perpetrator is a writer of children’s books who injects sloppiness into every page, I’m troubled. My awareness of the misuse of “like” began quite recently when Rachel, my ten-year-old granddaughter, on her summer visit, chose two of the “Mallory” books from the library for us to read together. Laurie Friedman’s characters speak pretty much as nine-year olds do, and her stories always teach a moral or two in thoroughly acceptable ways: “Take the bad with good,” “When given lemons make lemon pie,” “Even if you fail, keep on trying,” and so on. My beef with her is that she takes this one particular grammatical error and magnifies it, repeats it over and over again, dozens of times in each of her books, and so perpetuates it. Any child reading the stories will absorb and use the error for all time. It’s nice to teach morals but it would be nicer if sloppy language were not taught at the same time.
Here are a few “Mallory” examples:
“Everyone looks like they’re happy.”
“Max nods like he loves the idea.”
“Mom looks at Max like he should be doing his own jobs.”
“I don’t feel like I’ll be fine.”
“She looks like she’s waiting for me to make a decision..”
“Joey nods at Mary Ann like it’s no problem, but then he looks at me like it is a problem.”
“I talk to them like I’m a teacher.”
“Oh no! says Grandma like she can’t think of anything worse.”
Rachel and I read alternate chapters aloud; when it was my turn, I corrected every “like” to “as though” or “as if.”. Rachel soon got the hang of it and made necessary corrections when she read. I’m willing to bet she’ll rarely misuse “like” in the future – but I worry about all the other little girls who love the otherwise excellent Mallory books.
Copyright Monica B Morris 2010
Read Monica's Past Essays Here...