In the sentence “It’s going to take me like forever to get there,” it functions as an approximative adverb, signaling how strongly to interpret the following word almost and barely play similar roles.In the sentence “She was like, ‘Get out of my face,” the word signals the beginning of a quote and is known as a quotatative compartmentalizer.Shea explains that while like might be a staple of the Valley girl caricature, the word is actually performing useful linguistic duties: Here are some examples of the many of the comebacks you can use next time some jerk corrects your grammar or word usage: “What would be helpful to acknowledge is not only are some of these rules incredibly capricious, they’re also constantly changing … The thing that is oft overlooked is that as language changes, the rules that govern it change as well.” “Telling people that they are wrong in a malicious fashion is useless,” says Shea, who has also written a book about his quest to read the entire Oxford English Dictionary. He also hopes that it “will relieve many of us of the vague yet persistent unease that we are doing something improper.” But Shea’s deeper message is that language isn’t fixed-and that inventiveness and playfulness, whether in the form of combining words, or using emoticons, or plopping because into an entirely new grammatical construction, should be celebrated rather than stifled.
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On one level, of course, this fine book is just pedantry of one sort undermining pedantry of another sort. Along the way he debunks linguistic factoids, like the assertion that Shakespeare invented 10% of the words he used, and defends unlikely, oft-maligned characters like Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and people who say like a lot. uninterested-finding that, often as not, those rules used to be completely different than what they are today.
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To me that seems like euphemistic shorthand for saying ‘I like to correct the language use of others,’ which I have always found unseemly.”Īnd so he dug through the centuries of history that led to these rules-like when one must use disinterested vs. “You frequently hear people say, before attacking you, that they care about language,” says author Ammon Shea.