Mind your language
'WHY'S THERE so much post?' my husband asked.
'Oh it's all those board-school pedants complaining about me using (or "my using" as they'd say) like conjunc- tively as in: "It looks like Eliot got part of his inspiration for Four Quartets from reading Sherlock Holmes stories." ' 'What's wrong with that?'
'Nothing. Even dull old Fowler doesn't mind it. "It is the established way of putting the thing among all who have not been taught to avoid it," he says. And the Oxford English Dictionary gathers many examples from the best authors. Here we are, Jerome K. Jerome (1886): "Did Robinson Cnisoe wear trousers? I forget. Or did he go about like he does in the pantomime?" Or Southey (1856): "He talks like Brunswick did."
'But isn't it an Americanism?'
'As far as I can make out, that is a slightly different usage, which the OED calls predicative. You know, "I feel like an ice-cream." But Du Maurier in Trilby (1894) used it, and wasn't American: "Bother work this morning I feel much more like a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens."
'Well, I have got to work this morn- ing. I'm off to the surgery. I'll take an umbrella. It looks like it's going to rain.'
Dot Wordsworth
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