[HN Gopher] Language history and we: the case of "like"
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Language history and we: the case of "like"
Author : redeemed
Score : 10 points
Date : 2023-07-19 19:07 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.oup.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.oup.com)
| john_q_public wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of
| what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| john_q_public wrote:
| I submit that, given the obvious disdain the author has for
| the speech of ordinary people and what he considers "low"
| culture, "snob" is an entirely appropriate term.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The worst one today is people adding "uhhh" to the end of every
| sentence. "What did you do-wuuuh?" "Where should we go-wuuuh?"
| "Can't you see-yuhhh?" It grates on you even worse than vocal fry
| and like inserting like into like everything you like say.
| realfeel78 wrote:
| Who is doing this and where?
| JohnFen wrote:
| I hear this a lot from younger people in Europe and the US.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Loads of languages around the word have a sentence-final
| particle that doesn't mean anything on its own but serves as a
| vocative particle, creates a bond between speaker and listener,
| softens the assertion for politeness sake, etc. Some varieties
| of UK English already used _innit?_ that way. It's pretty
| normal human linguistic behavior.
| gumby wrote:
| Yeah, Malay has "la" which gets tacked onto a sentence or
| phrase following rules that are intuitive but I doubt I could
| write down.
|
| My mum could use a single "la" as an entire sentence and we
| knew _exactly_ what she meant, rarely something good.
| JohnFen wrote:
| But that one is particularly grating because it's exactly the
| same thing that young children do when they're whining or
| begging.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| If a linguistic behavior has spread widely enough for you
| to notice it, then obviously the bulk of people (or the
| bulk of that speaker's people, at least) don't find it
| grating.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Obviously so, but that doesn't affect the fact that it
| grates on me.
|
| This particular thing appears to be largely generational
| and rather regional so I don't encounter it frequently.
| arp242 wrote:
| In Ireland people add "like" to the end of a sentence like.
|
| Quite a different way to use "like" than what this article
| talks about.
| cempaka wrote:
| I've tried to get out of the habit of this one now that I have
| kids learning from my example, but it really takes a lot of
| focus. What's funny is that I can remember the period as a kid
| where it was taking and being bothered by it ("why does everyone
| want to sound like Shaggy from Scooby Doo?"), before I apparently
| gave in and adopted it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Language is a social construct. People tend to modify their
| speech to be in line with the speech of those around them.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| That's a bizarre article from an actual linguist.
| john_q_public wrote:
| [flagged]
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