‘High street stalwart Marks & Spencer is preparing to go head-to-head with the likes of Topshop,’ said a news report the other day. Never mind ‘going head-to-head’, a metaphor presumably taken from the life of the caribou or elk, and enthusiastically seized upon by people who like to speak of going ‘belly up’ or ‘pear-shaped’, or being ‘dead in the water’ or, more unpleasantly, ‘twisting in the wind’. It’s ‘the likes of’ that I find curious. It has in recent generations borne a derogatory sense. It would be used by a gruff constable to a suspicious person loitering in a public place, or in a pitifully self-depreciatory way by a downtrodden maid of all works who could hardly believe that the young gentleman should notice ‘the likes of me’.
But now showbusiness journalists habitually write of ‘the likes of Victoria Beckham’ with no pejorative intent.
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