Transcript of “Liketa, Likedta, Liked To”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, my name’s Jason. I’m calling from Central Florida.
I was wondering if you could help me figure out how prevalent a particular turn of phrase is that I have heard many times in my life.
Growing up in Florida and around a lot of older folks who have a little bit more of the Florida Southern accent, I often hear them say, liked to never.
So they use it in a way that kind of means almost did not.
So an example might be, it started raining yesterday and it liked to never stop.
Which is not unusual for Florida.
That’s right.
And this is something you’ve heard your whole life throughout Florida or just in central Florida?
I’ve only lived in central Florida, but I have heard it my entire life from various people that I’ve spoken with, mostly my family members, especially maybe older members of my family who have a little bit more of a southern accent than I do.
Okay.
If you had traveled to northern Florida or gone even further throughout the American South, into Georgia and Alabama or into the Carolinas or Kentucky and Tennessee and perhaps even further, you would have heard it also.
Definitely in Appalachia, Arkansas and Missouri as well, maybe even into Texas, and even sometimes in outside of the South and parts of the rural North.
Because this is an expression that has been established in the United States since the 1700s.
Not always in the negative sense with the never, but sometimes in the positive sense.
Like, I’d like to.
Written, it sometimes looks like L-I-K-E-T-A.
Like, I like to fall over when he pushed me from behind.
And it’s directly related to likely.
Like something is likely to happen.
Like I’m likely to never paint my head purple, you know?
Right.
I’m likely to never grow wings, just to come up with some ridiculous examples.
And these are something that we get from British dialect uses.
So where it’s the most common in the United States is where people from certain regions of the United Kingdom settled in the United States.
So that’s why it’s sprinkled mostly and most thoroughly throughout the U.S. South.
I’m a little surprised to hear that it’s common in central Florida, but not all that surprised, because there’s somewhere between the Florida panhandle and the very southern tip of Florida, the dialect map starts to shift.
You know, it goes from the very classic southern American English to something else, maybe more of the, you know, there’s a lot of overlay of the snowbird accents from people who come down from the Northeast and of course, all the Latin American layers and language.
They say of Florida that the farther north you go, the farther south you get, which I think makes a lot of sense.
That’s exactly it. That’s what I was going for. That’s exactly it.
That’s exactly it. But yeah, so this is something like, just as you said, you’re saying almost or nearly.
And originally, if you’d written it out back in the day, centuries ago, it might have looked like liked to.
I had liked to, L-I-K-E-D space T-O, or like to, L-I-K-E space T-O, as two separate words.
But often to these days, it looks like one word or sounds like one word.
That’s very interesting. Thank you so much.
Our pleasure. Call us again sometime, Jason.
All right. Have a great day.
You take care of yourself.
Take care. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Like Jason, if you’ve heard a word or phrase that’s tickled your ear and you’re curious about it, let us know.
