Timeline for "She dressed like/as an owl." Which is correct?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:55 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://ell.stackexchange.com/ with https://ell.stackexchange.com/
|
|
| Aug 5, 2016 at 16:16 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | You chose to add the context to the party, which kinda limits possible interpretations. But Joshua goes for a completely different one with The lady of the house dresses as a servant, all alone, pulling her corset only as tight as she herself can. They're both valid use of language in the relevant scenarios, but without full context, it's almost meaningless to speculate on exactly what an utterance means. However, I do think the distinction I've made is the most likely to achieve a reasonably wide consensus (but nothing is hard-and-fast). | |
| Aug 5, 2016 at 15:59 | comment | added | Matt Fletcher | @FumbleFingers I dunno, AAVE doesn't exist where I'm from, but coming at it from a British angle, if someone said "She dressed like a child [to the party]", you would imagine that she appeared in children's clothing. | |
| Aug 5, 2016 at 12:12 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Matt: A colloquialism? You crazy, man! (i.e. - so far as I can see, discarding the auxiliary verb like that is only really credible in AAVE :) | |
| Aug 5, 2016 at 12:09 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Ben: Well, I did say these are not hard-and-fast distinctions, and obviously there are more than two "more-or-less distinct" possible meanings. I just tried to isolate the two most distinct meanings that could reasonably be associated with the two different usages. | |
| Aug 5, 2016 at 7:21 | comment | added | Ben Aaronson | "She dressed like a child" would more imply to me that she wore clothes a child would wear, rather than the actual process of putting on those clothes was childlike. The like vs. as distinction seems to be more about intent- if you dress like a pirate, you wear clothes that a pirate might wear, perhaps because that happens to be your general taste. If you dress as a pirate, your intent was to make yourself look like a pirate. | |
| Aug 5, 2016 at 7:21 | comment | added | Matt Fletcher |
I would still see She dressed like a child as a colloquialism of She was dressed like a child, rather than the past tense of to dress.
|
|
| Aug 5, 2016 at 5:10 | vote | accept | CommunityBot | ||
| Aug 3, 2016 at 12:48 | history | edited | FumbleFingers | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 1635 characters in body
|
| Aug 2, 2016 at 21:20 | comment | added | P. E. Dant Reinstate Monica | @FumbleFingers Aside from the alarming prospect of a bunch of naked owls fluttering about, there is a deep and interesting question here about the differences in apprehension of like and as that is worthy of more digging. Mrs. Blashfield's stern insistence on the non-congruence of metaphor and simile is in there somewhere. | |
| Aug 2, 2016 at 18:04 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Moos: That's not so much a switch from "present" to "past" - more a switch from "active" to "passive". It's hard to imagine the like version there meaning The way [someone] dressed her was similar to the way an owl would dress someone, but you could perhaps disambiguate She was stoned like an adulteress (stoned in the same way primitives might stone an adulteress) from She was stoned as an adulteress (stoned because she was an adulteress). Semantic distinctions are always possible, and may turn on the exact choice of preposition. | |
| Aug 2, 2016 at 17:40 | comment | added | Moos Hueting | What about past tense? It seems to me the difference between "She was dressed like an owl" vs. "She was dressed as an owl" is not as marked. Thoughts? | |
| Aug 2, 2016 at 16:07 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | But I did! ...so in OP's context the intended sense must be as per #2. Then I made the point that even though there's little scope for ambiguity in OP's specific case, we'd still usually choose to use as rather than like. | |
| Aug 2, 2016 at 15:46 | comment | added | Catija | But it's probably worth noting that, particularly since owls don't wear clothes, in general, regardless of whether you said like or as in the OP's case, pretty much everyone would interpret it to mean "She wore an owl costume". | |
| Aug 2, 2016 at 15:32 | history | answered | FumbleFingers | CC BY-SA 3.0 |