Begging The Question

I've lost the source by now, but sometime over the holiday I caught some scold criticizing a public figure (a politician, I think) for talking about her parents and using the construction "They were like, 'Blah blah blah,' and I was like, 'Whatever.'" According to the critic, the speaker should have used "said" instead of "were like," asserting not only that "were like" is wrong but also that is sets a bad example for people who might emulate the public figure. I believe the comparison was to President Bush's famous "Is our children learning?"

My example above isn't exactly what the speaker said, and I probably made her seem pretty vapid. So let's use this one: "My parents were like, 'You'd better get all A's,' and I was like, 'But math is hard!'" (Okay, maybe still a little valley-girl, but you get the idea.) Why is this so awful? If a speaker uses "said" when mentioning another's statements, we assume the speaker is relating a verbatim quotation. But the speaker's parents might not have said "You'd better get all A's" in precisely those words. Using "said," therefore, might convey misinformation or a misperception. Even using a qualifier like "I'm paraphrasing" suggests the quote is in the ballpark.

But "were like" conveys exactly what was intended: that the speaker's parents (and her) said things and took an attitude which were in essence (or, were like) the "were like" statement. It's a general position rather than a direct quotation. It's shorthand for "expressed sentiments along the lines of." In adopting those sentiments, the parents' feelings were like that position.

Here, I think "said" says too much, and most people understand what the speaker means when saying "were like." I don't see it as a lot different than using "goes" for "said," as in, "And then he goes, 'You'd better get all A's,' and I go, 'Math is hard!'" I'm not a big fan of that construction, but I still understand what it means.

This kind of scolding for an essentially harmless (even if arguably ungrammatical) figure of speech just reinforces my belief that most grammar scolds are simply fuddy-duddies. Prof. Volokh writes a lot about this type of thing. I'm not sure if he would agree with me on "were like," but some people certainly can be pedantic about "goes." For the record, linguists actually study "like" and go" (20-page pdf), so it's not merely sub-literates who use these constructions. But regardless, I don't think the poor children are going to be doomed to be Wiggums because some politician was going "were like."

On a related note, NRO's Jonah Goldberg points to another example of pedantry over "literally." The example here was Hillary Clinton saying that her Iowa volunteers were "outside literally freezing to death," when, of course, none of them truly got hypothermia and died.

I'm not the first to point out that no one blinks at a usage like "I was really dying out there," when the word "really" can mean "truly" or "actually" just like "literally" can. You weren't really dying, were you? We have accepted that "really" has a figurative, metaphorical usage, and eventually we'll feel the same about "literally."

In this case, though, I'm not even sure Clinton was necessarily wrong, even for the literally-literalists. After all, if her supporters had stayed out long enough, they probably would have, in fact, gotten hypothermia and possibly died. She didn't, after all, say that they had frozen to death; she said they were freezing, that is, in the process of becoming frozen. I'm glad they stopped literally freezing to death before they became really frozen to death.

Milbarge @ 12:10 AM | |