And I’m like, Quotative ‘like’ isn’t just for quoting
One of the most noticeable changes in modern everyday English usage is the ascent of like in its various guises. Last week Michael Rundell at Macmillan Dictionary Blog briefly surveyed the development, noting that the word’s relatively recent use in reporting direct speech – known as quotative like – is “widely disliked by traditionalists”.
There are various reasons for the aversion. Any usage that becomes suddenly popular will attract criticism. Frequent use of like is also perceived as lazy, or associated with triviality. Facebook likes, filler likes (So, like, OK), and hedging or approximating likes (He was like six feet) serve only to underline how ubiquitous the word has become.
Some, like the Acadamy of Linguistic Awarness [sic], revile this state of affairs:
Others take pride in it:
Like is like soooo divisive, and quotative like in particular is often misunderstood. If you search online for hate the word like or some such string, you’ll find plenty of knee-jerk antipathy to it that largely assumes its synonymity with said. That is, there’s a common misconception that I was like, [X] = I said, [X]. But often this is not the case, about which more shortly.
First, it’s worth noting that those of us who use quotative like use it in a range of tenses, for example past (She was like, “Let me know”), historical present (So last week he’s like, “Are we ready yet?” and we’re all like, “Yes!”), and future (If that happens I’ll be like, “Uh-oh.”).
This use of like, reporting direct speech more or less, became very popular in recent times with young people especially, though far from exclusively, establishing itself as a normal usage – even a dominant one in some groups. But with quotative like we can do more than simply report speech: we may convey an interaction with expansive social and performative detail.
As Jessica Love observed in the American Scholar a couple of years ago, quotative like
encourages a speaker to embody the participants in a conversation. Thus, the speaker vocalizes the contents of participants’ utterances, but also her attitudes toward those utterances. She can dramatize multiple viewpoints, one after another, making it perfectly clear all the while which views she sympathizes with and which she does not.
Quotative like has also undergone striking developments on the internet. Some users of social media are typing “I’m like” (or “I’m all like”, etc.) and following it with an image or image macro. It’s a meme-friendly playground of creativity in which the images themselves are being embedded in the syntax.
Here are some examples with text:
And some without text:
Offline we might say I’m like and make a caricatured facial expression; online, we use images instead to communicate those staged reactions. These funny, often self-deprecating tweets use instantly interpretable images to substitute for (and expand upon) those physical gestures, expressions, and body language that accompany ordinary speech but are difficult or impossible to replicate online.
Last month the NY Times quoted Robin Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard, who believes
This is a watershed time where we are moving away from photography as a way of recording and storing a past moment . . . [and] turning photography into a communication medium.
And not just photography but image macros, TV and film stills, comics, animated gifs, the whole gamut of shortform visual data we’ve been incorporating into online discourse. (Jessica Love has also pondered the possibilities of a language based on real-time images.) Who’s to say what will emerge from this hybrid domain?
Quotative like can set up a whole miniature drama, with visual content contributing to a richer vocabulary than words alone could license. Online and off, used with images or micro-performances, quotative like is not a lazy crutch of semi-literate teens but a handy and highly functional addition to our lexicon – and to our paralinguistic repertoire. No wonder it has caught on.
And I’m all like
Updates:
In ‘The Internet is a James Joyce Novel‘, Jessica Love at the American Scholar picks up on this post and ponders the spread of captioned images qua memes and their communicative uses:
[L]ike it or not, memes are playing an increasingly prominent role in public discourse. . . . The increasing ease with which we can combine language and pictures will only lead to further innovations.
From an excellent post by Arnold Zwicky on Language Log, December 2006:
[T]eenagers have been fond of discourse-particle uses of like for quite some time, at least 50 years; some people now in their 50s and 60s still use like this way. Meanwhile, quotative like has risen in 25 or 30 years to become the dominant quotative in the speech of young people (and some older speakers use it too). The result is that some young people are indeed heavy users of like in functions that some of their elders do not use it in. And many of these older speakers are annoyed as hell about that.
Zwicky further explores the sociolinguistic aspects of like, confirming its usefulness and examining why exactly some people dislike it so much. He finds that:
discourse-particle and quotative like have both linguistic value (they can be used to convey nuances of meaning) and social value (they’re part of the way personas and social-group memberships are projected).
Steven Poole reminded me of his post at Unspeak a few years ago taking Christopher Hitchens to task for a shallow denigration of quotative like:
he was like and he said do not actually mean the same thing; and Hitchens is like, I do not approve of this youthspeak that I have not made sufficient efforts to understand?
Mercedes Durham told me of research she and colleagues did on the “Constant linguistic effects in the diffusion of ‘be like’” (PDF).
They report on two studies of “change in social and linguistic effects on be like usage and acceptability”, and find “no evidence of change in linguistic constraints on be like [e.g., speaker age, tense, quote content] as it has diffused into U.K. and U.S. Englishes”.
Another development: ‘Like’ is an infix now, which is un-like-believably innovative.
#electronicCommunication #grammar #imageMacros #internet #internetCulture #language #languageChange #like #linguistics #memes #photography #pragmatics #slang #speech #syntax #twitter #wordplay #words
Of Topic: Antique Dictator 4 Sale
The Computer: […]https://streetartutopia.com/2011/02/05/antique-dictator-4-sale/
Mit diesem Mist habe ich mir ja einiges aufgehalst – jetzt wird man schon renitent, wenn ich den Artikel nicht schnell genug schreibe.
Jedenfalls – während der Dienst, der das Web der Amateure lange Jahre vor dem Web 2.0 möglich gemacht hat, geschlossen wurde, hat ein anderer, bei dem wirklich jeder Depp mitmachen kann, eine Möglichkeit bekommen, Kontakte in Gruppen einzusortieren. And There was Much Rejoicing. Und wenn nicht, dann gibt es auch was, was wirklich jeden zum Lächeln bringt.
Und wenn man wirklich wissen möchte, was man so von der Banner- und Werbewelt denken sollte – naja, eine Million Fliegen können nicht irren.
#geocities #happiness #twitter #werbung
When Does Bruce Wayne Sleep?
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2009/10/when-does-bruce-wayne-sleep/
I've been thinking about James Whatley's discussion asking When does Batman sleep?Here's the pull-quote...
Sometimes Brian, I find myself stuck in front of the laptop at like 10pm on a Sunday night. The kids are in bed, the wife isn’t far behind and there I am answering customer care questions over Twitter with some guy in Geneva! This isn’t my day job. I’m a developer. My question to you is sir; when does Batman sleep?
I find myself in a somewhat similar position.My twitter account, like this blog, is strictly personal. These are my views, not those of my employers. Yet sometimes, I give what could be seen as professional advice.
I'm interested in phones - so when someone asks me for a phone recommendation, I'm usually happy to help. But should I recommend Vodafone devices? Should I recommend them a Vodafone device when I know there may be a better device on T-O2ang3?
On the one hand, my whuffie will increase if I offer an honest assessment - on the other hand, the share price may go up and I may get a commission if I recommend my company's products.
What should I do?
When I see a story about a potentially corrupt deal in Africa - I'd usually be compelled to comment on it. But if the story involves my employers, I'm reluctant to.
The second story is no less interesting or important - but can I risk being seen as an employee giving an official critique on the company? Can I risk the potential drop in share price? Can I risk my personal comments infringing on my professional life?
What should I do?
I'm not Batman - I'm barely even Alfred. I work to live - I don't live to work.
I think it's accepted that I can use my private persona to improve my public persona. I can answer professional questions in a personal capacity. But if I do it too much, I risk being seen as nothing but a company stooge - without any of the protection of an "official" professional.
Recently, the role was reversed. My employers recently asked me to use my personal network to the benefit of my private network. At the launch of Vodafone 360 they wanted me to live twitter, twitpic, Qik and YouTube from my personal account.
This presented a problem for me. When I breach the sanctity of my personal account with professional content, do I devalue myself. Don't get me wrong, I don't think I'm Shakespeare being paid to fill Romeo and Juliet with references to Durex, but I like to think I have some integrity.
What Do You Think?
So, I asked the people who follow me.
Terence Eden is on Mastodon
@edent
I've been asked to twitter for a Vodafone launch event. Should I do it from @edent or should I keep this non-professional? ❤️ 0💬 0🔁 010:26 - Wed 09 September 2009
Reassuringly, the answers they gave were all in a similar vein.
The Actionable Futurist® Andrew Grill
@AndrewGrill
Replying to @edent@edent Why not set up an "event" twitter handle for the event - keep all separate ❤️ 0💬 0🔁 010:27 - Wed 09 September 2009
Rachel Clarke
@rachelclarke
Replying to @edent@edent do it from another account - with the occasional cross-tweet from this one ❤️ 0💬 0🔁 010:28 - Wed 09 September 2009
Helen Keegan
@technokitten
Replying to @edent@edent depends how interested you think we'll be in reading the tweets. @AndrewGrill's idea of sep acct is good. ❤️ 0💬 0🔁 010:29 - Wed 09 September 2009
Denny
@denny
Replying to @edent@edent I quite like convergence, but would doing it from @edent compromise your ability to speak for yourself in future? ❤️ 0💬 0🔁 010:31 - Wed 09 September 2009
ilicco
@ilicco
Replying to @edent@edent definitely @VodafoneUK although a few of the purtinent titbits from edent is good too ❤️ 0💬 0🔁 010:42 - Wed 09 September 2009
Matt Millar
@millarm
Replying to @edent@edent do it from the vodafone official account ( @VodafoneUK ), and retweet that from your account @VodafoneUK ❤️ 0💬 0🔁 013:14 - Wed 09 September 2009
So, that's what I did. I tweeted and twitpic'd from @Vodafone_Group.
I didn't have time to set up a separate Qik account, so I used my own.
When I saw something that I thought my followers would find genuinely interesting, I retweeted my "professional" account.
But I feel uneasy about this. I don't want to be seen as "just" a Vodafone employee. I was originally @Vodaclone on twitter, but I changed my name to fully disassociate myself from my (current) employer.
I want to be interesting enough to be friends with. I don't want people to be friendly with me only because of what I do 9-5. I also don't want to alienate those who are interested in me by appearing to be partisan.
Reversing the Roles
What prompted me to write this post was a tweet I made this morning.
Terence Eden is on Mastodon
@edent
@bash @kate_day any chance you could have a quiet word with someone about CC & flickr? http://bit.ly/Rnrex ❤️ 1💬 0🔁 008:44 - Thu 15 October 2009
Both Bash and Kate work for the Telegraph. Neither of them tweet in a professional capacity.
I can't help feeling that I abused their personal space to ask them a professional question. Both were very polite in answering me. But, if they're anything like me, they'll soon find it tiresome to have every Tom, Dick and Harry asking them the same banal questions again and again.
I'm a firm believer in life/work balance. How do I square this with my desire to help my friends and help my employers? Is it even possible to demarcate between the personal and the professional?
When does Bruce Wayne get a night off?
#twitter #vf360 #vodafone #workLife