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342. Valerie Fridland — Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English

The Michael Shermer Show

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The Importance of Adverbial Approximators

There are three main ways we use like that are very different. So you'll have one kind of like called an adverbial approximator, which is a big word for it stands in for a word like about. The difference is there's a subtle sort of suggestion with the like that you're doing and in fact you're adding it for emphasis. For younger speakers, it probably doesn't even need to do that. It just tends to be what they use more often for the word about.

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