The superfluous use of the word "like" in the popular vernacular

General Discussion
41

The lazy aggressively semi-literate minority I am thinking of are not necessarily still schoolchildren, they are not suffering from disabilities but they are people living in an impoverished (emotionally, intellectually, socially) environment who see teachers as the enemy, who don’t have social skills or very few, frequently see no difference between right and wrong as applied to others, and are perpetually simmering with anger because they don’t know how to communicate and nobody is telepathic so they are frustrated. Probably their own parents are/were the same. They won’t have spent much time at school and they don’t know how it works and don’t want to either, as I said it is the enemy along with social workers who have the added dimension of having some sort of authority and simultaneously being do-gooder mugs to be taken in.

I am not talking about nice people with dyslexia, or not very clever people who are just slow at the mechanics of reading and writing, I am talking about a specific minority who make everyone’s life difficult and who should nevertheless be catered for.

1 Like
42

Here you can practise to say and use the word like :dizzy_face:
http://www.manythings.org/audio/sentences/65.html

43

We moved to Yorkshire just before my daughter’s 5th birthday. Within a year she was using slang and saying t’ rather than to. I corrected her regularly and she has no discernible accent although she can put it on thick when she wants to. She thanks me now and is proud of the fact that her university friends refer to her as posh because she speaks so nicely.
I quite like accents, well some, but I’m under no illusion that a strong Yorkshire accent could have affected her in the workplace.

44

Different to is something that used to seem unusual because I was educated in the fifties but I don’t mind now and Fowler’s M.E.Usage has this to say about it…

“The commonly expressed view that different should only be followed by from and not by to or than is not supportable in the face of past and present evidence or of logic…”

But if I were with someone whom I knew to be a traditionalist it would be distracting and rather rude to depart from the conventional.

2 Likes
45

Where she differs from her daughter is in her hair colouring. Where he differs to his friend is in his political orientation.

Which one is better English?

46

Vero, I knew you didn’t mean ‘nice people’, I think you are, very obviously,NOT easily hoodwinked by deliberate villains, or that you fail to see potential.
I should have resisted the urge to bring my dad into it. My thought was, that you would not have thought of him as any kind of villain (although I don’t know, yet, your feelings about people IDd as ’ scrounging, living off others’ via social housing.,) but, I know for some, that’s exactly how he was IDd.)
I just used him, in this case, as a typical example of erroneous judgement.
He was tall and ‘looked’ strong and fit. (ie. No excuse for social housing).

Certainly, I might have fitted,
as quite seriously aggressive and anti edu, though not with any successful ferocity at that time.
I didn’t understand why anyone would count us to be outsiders, but there were clearly reasons, or at least, explanations? to be found.

Now I know some of them, and feel better equipped to deal with them, without high power tasers or AK 47s. but still, that doesn’t stop me wanting to go for the throat of anyone who sounds a tiny bit overly dismissive of ‘inferiors’, and not open enough to nurturing necessary self awareness/ individual choice, in any teaching environment. That’s how your post ‘read’ to me.
I understand you did not intend that impression! :smiley:

47

…funny…I signed on for some very serious French lessons, in Rennes uni. when I first came, perhaps ‘like’ had been identified as a Brit weakness, even then.,
I know we were given a long list of French ways to say/use french ‘like’, All forgotten now, except ‘J’ai envie de…’

48

I spend quite a lot of my time persuading parents round here (principally ouvriers agricoles, the most deprived sector of society according to insee) that it is neither pointless nor a waste of time and effort for their child to go on to further or higher education, putting them in touch with the bursary people, the housing people, the student health people etc.
It doesn’t need to cost them a centime, that is one of the very good things about France, the possibility for anyone with the brains and work-ethic to go as far as they wish to including to the very top without money being an issue.

2 Likes
49

Vero, I grew up in the era when those reading the news on radio, were required to be formally dressed, and have ‘cut-glass accents’. On the radio!!! voices that could cut glass!)
It was also the time when having any accent other than ‘posh’ automatically put you into an English ‘class’ of lower value.
I don’t remember exactly when Universities started to accept non-posh students, but it must have been after I left school in 1955. As a lifelong Oik, I remember my ludicrous and stumbling efforts to lose my lower working class London accent, as even at 15 years old I knew I had no chance of anything other than a factory of laboring job.

By 1968 I gave up, and buggered off out of the UK, and never regretted it, but I did note on odd visits the arrival of regional accents on local radio which I thought a brilliant breakthrough.

Anyone who doesn’t know what a ‘cut glass accent’ sounded like, listen to Celia Johnson’s in the otherwise brilliant film of Brief Encounter (Trevor Howard’s was also ‘upper’)

50

I have seen advice that it would be helpful in learning French to follow tv soaps.
Can you imagine how difficult it be for French people learning English if they all started speaking like the cast of Eastenders?

51

I haven’t been talking about regional accents, people may have regional accents and a rich and varied vocabulary and speak entirely grammatically. Look at Scotland.
The point I was trying to make is that it is simply too easy to justify a slack attitude to teaching by saying that a solecism such as ‘we was sat down’ is a regionalism and therefore we won’t correct it, leaving little Johnny at a disadvantage because the children in the ‘smart’ school along the road will be told that ‘we was sat down’ is wrong in several ways and they shouldn’t say it, let alone write it. It makes a difference to outcomes.

As an aside about accents which otherwise don’t matter: I don’t think people with very thick regional accents should teach their language, whatever it may be, to foreigners without making their accent more neutral, because it is a disservice to their pupils.

2 Likes
52

Reflecting on the points raised here, I was reminded of my own time Lecturing in English to multiple non-English as a first language students. I soon learned from them that the biggest problem of all in learning or listening to a foreign language was and is the ‘speed of delivery’.

I would suggest that most here have had the same experience in learning French - I know I have, which (apart from incipient deafness) has lead me to having good level of reading comprehension, and a far less one auditively. Most need a moment to process and translate the information before understanding is made. This is also a problem at say a dinner party where several are speaking pretty much at the same time even in the same Mother tongue.

I fairly quickly also realised that few students would be prepared to stop me and ask to go a bit more slowly. This a mix of a) courtesy and b) not wanting to appear dense. So before each Lecture and/or Course I gave them all this piece of advice. If I was going too fast then they should unobtrusively pass a hand under their chin. Facing them I would see this instantly, whilst almost no-one else would. Also as an aside it is amazing what you can see as a Lecturer and react to, notably body language generally.

It is also true about ‘eyes lighting up’ when something is grasped mentally. Very rewarding too for the speaker.

1 Like
53

Was about to respond to Vero’s comment, and Vero, you sound quite stern and serious much of the time, and I like that. …
…but got one of those “notes in the margin”, which says…

" Let others join the conversation
This topic is clearly important to you – you’ve posted more than 21% of the replies here.
It could be even better if you got other people space to share their points of view, too. Can you invite them over?".

I don’t understand.
Are comments in the margin automatic?
There’s no one really there, just a bot and its algorithms?
I can’t argue/address a bot, if so, Please don’t guess, Mr Bot, about “importance”. Your ‘tone’, with that 21%, sounds a bit tetchy, but I don’t like to guess about you, anymore than I like to be guessed about.

In terms of " importance", its not a life/death matter, for me or billions of others, I just like the topic better than happy chat, which I can’t do well, even when I want to.
However, the important mystery is,
does it really appear to be an exclusive conversation?
Do I really need to “invite people over?” This is an open forum, and I’d feel like a micro dob of shit if at any time, I attempted to exclude anyone, for any reason.
So, may I make it perfectly clear, please, if I reply, by ‘name’ to someone’s post, everyone is more than welcome to comment, although I think I should know from where the comment comes, so I don’t mistake them, as another Bot. Is that reasonable?
I must add a smiley, IN CASE I am mistakenly assumed to be in a bad temper etc. :grin: :grin: :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: :innocent: :blush: :relaxed:

54

Nope lost me there @anon78757855

I work in tech and the first rule of tech is… “ignore tech”. It just pays the bills.

55

I wish my teachers would have thought of that genial communication method.

56

Thank you, Darren, do you mean…you work in the tech dept of SF?
Or ‘in tech’ elsewhere?

I would like to know if the comments are Human, or if they are tech. Bot.
Do you know, please? :smiley:

57

Well I am human.

I am a software developer, but I don’t work for SF. SF uses an “of the shelf” web forum package called “Discourse”. Its a popular package.

I think the comments here are human. They are way too prickly to be a bot.

However chatbots are common, but basic. This site could have one…Found a post on google…

1 Like
59

Wonderful! Darren that’s interesting stuff! Thank you.
I think they may well be extra-clever 'DiscoBots comments!"
Yes a bit prickly! BUT
perhaps theres a selection of packages available, if you Google long enough.
So SF might have picked one, that can choose a suitable level of charm or prickliness, according to poster characteristics.
I’ll just try “fuck off” next time! :grin: And see if I can cross its wires a bit.
Comments in the margin might get more Dictator/ Camp Guard style?
:innocent:

60

You are crazy girl…

Are you one of those ladies who says “fuck” to see what response you get?

1 Like
61

hahahaha! this is my kind of scenario, you might be a Bot yourself…but you don’t know it!
Seriously
The comments are definitely not from flesh and blood, forum members.
Have you never got one yourself?
When you write something, and think its finished, the bot makes a comment * beside it* where no flesh and blood forum peeps can ever go!
Its no use at all trying to make me think of myself as an extra terrestrial, or mildly batchy OAP! I copied and pasted the last one, I can do them all, in future. It might look like a developing, serious case of multiple personality disorder, but AINT!:joy: