I’m stuck in a fine old barney with Prof Michael McCarthy, the co-author of the new Cambridge Grammar of English. This grammar calmly notes that like can be used to introduce direct speech, instead of said, as in ‘I was like, “Wow!” He was like, “Come off it”.’ I can’t abide this construction, which is hardly grammar at all, more oral punctuation. People who use it, often the would-be young, are annoying.
But Prof McCarthy thinks me an ignorant old housewife stamping her foot at historical inevitability. It is, he says, ‘an unequal battle between a columnist and a robust, living organism that has weathered hundreds of such onslaughts’ — not himself, but the English language.
‘There are two basic types of grammar,’ the Prof explains, ‘a prescriptive grammar (which tells you what the author thinks you ought to say and write, with little or no reference to speech) and a descriptive grammar (which tells you what people do say and write, based on the collection of masses of contemporary spoken and written data).
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