Word Watch: Likely

“It is reported that the number of people killed in the devastating fires on the Hawaiian island of Maui will likely rise…” BBC news headline, 11 August 2023

I’ve mentioned this increasingly popular Americanism before (see Word Watch August 2020), and now it features in a BBC headline, and so must be admitted to the ranks of standard current English. Its emergence has been so gradual that probably no-one will even notice the change, but it has a palpable effect on the sound of an English sentence, so must be openly acknowledged. 

It occurs now in places where we would always in the past have said “probably” – as I did quite deliberately in the previous sentence. The difference is that “likely” in American English is usually an adverb, whereas in British English it is (or was) an adjective, as in “The likely author of the crime”, where ‘”likely” means “probable”;  or “the Likely Lads”, where “likely” means “promising” or “having potential”. A glance at the dictionary reveals “likely” as a maid-of-all-work, used in many contexts to signify similarity, likeness, probability or viability. The catalogue of meanings is so different in English and American that one should be careful to distinguish which is in mind.

The bare syllable “like”, stripped of any suffix, has taken over many of these numerous senses in colloquial speech, and has become if anything over-familiar. It has endured that most humiliating of verbal fates, and become a mere “filler”: almost universally employed now as a random sound to amplify a phrase or a sentence, it often possesses no meaning at all, not even syntactical sense. It can be used in place of noun, verb, adverb or adjective, or even a complete sentence. In this extreme manifestation it stems, I gather, from Black American usage, whence it has been transplanted whole into the British vernacular, where it crops up ubiquitously. It’s commonly encountered in phrases such as “I was like …” which is so far from any accepted construction as to need translation. That group of words carries the sense: “I said…”, so alters the meaning of “was”, past tense of the verb “to be”, to signify “uttered”, and transmutes the content of the phrase uttered to a paraphrase (or purported paraphrase) of the utterance. 

But when we enter these waters, largely uncharted as yet by the lexicographers, it is prudent to withdraw and acknowledge that we are lost, far further afield than any Hawaiian island.

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