Like

Use this forum to suggest Good Words for Professor Beard.
bbeeton
Senior Lexiterian
Posts: 552
Joined: Sat Oct 24, 2020 11:34 am
Location: Providence, RI

Like

Postby bbeeton » Tue May 11, 2021 11:28 am

"Like" is a very prolific word. It can be a verb, or it can form a comparison, as illustrated by these sentences beloved by linguistics students:

Time flies like an arrow.

Fruit flies like a banana. (Corrected.)

(Which also illustrate oddities with "time" and "flies", but that's not the topic of this disquisitiion.)

"Like" is also a prolific combiner: likely, likeness, unlike, dislike, childlike, likewise, ...

And clearly, in its non-verbal sense, it's related to the German "-lich".

But "like" is so common that a search on the site refuses to respond. The other forms shown here appear in commentary but not as topics.
Last edited by bbeeton on Fri May 14, 2021 11:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

Audiendus
Wordmaster
Posts: 909
Joined: Sun Feb 14, 2010 6:08 pm
Location: London, UK

Re: Like

Postby Audiendus » Thu May 13, 2021 10:36 pm

Time flies like a banana.
I think that should be:

Fruit flies like a banana.

bbeeton
Senior Lexiterian
Posts: 552
Joined: Sat Oct 24, 2020 11:34 am
Location: Providence, RI

Re: Like

Postby bbeeton » Fri May 14, 2021 11:34 am

Thank you, Audiendus. You listen carefully.

(My laptop is obstreperous, and deleted what I was typing while I was typing it. Obviously I wasn't paying sufficient attention while retyping.)


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