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Example:

  • Why don't airlines like when one intentionally misses a flight to save money?
  • Why don't airlines like it when one intentionally misses a flight to save money?

Are they both grammatically correct, and if so, are they synonymous?

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  • 3
    As a British English speaker I don't find the first one idiomatic.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Aug 23, 2023 at 14:58
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    People increasingly discard the pronoun it in such contexts, but that's still a "minority usage". Mainstream grammar would still say the pronoun should be present. I makes no real difference to the meaning, though.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Aug 23, 2023 at 15:43
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    In AmE, the pronoun is even more often discarded, and both would be colloquialy acceptable. See books.google.com/ngrams/…,: "like when" far exceeds "like it when".
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Commented Aug 23, 2023 at 16:09
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    @DrMoishePippik I suspect that your ngrams include various unrelated usages. (For example, "That's what it will look like when it's done.")
    – MarcInManhattan
    Commented Aug 24, 2023 at 3:35
  • As an American English speaker, one is not idiomatic and this AmE/BrE thing is not relevant. People forget that for BrE there are millions of fewer speakers than for AmE but that does not make supposed AmE different from BrE in many cases. This is one of them. Looking on the Internet brings up a lot of crummy speech.
    – Lambie
    Commented Oct 25, 2023 at 14:08

3 Answers 3

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As a native British English speaker, the second option reads naturally, but the first sounds incorrect. I'd be left thinking 'why don't airlines like what, when one intentionally misses...'

When using the first person, both options would probably be heard in everyday speech, but it would still be more natural to say 'I like it when'.

Did you ever find an answer to the question?!

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Why don't airlines like when one intentionally misses a flight to save money?

The verb like is generally transitive in standard English. It requires an object. To make it grammatical, it needs it.

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The easy part of the question is "if so, are they synonymous?". The answer is yes.

The hard part is "Are they both grammatically correct". Apparently, many people here in this discussion think it doesn't seem grammatical. I think it does seem grammatical. So, at best, from this sample, the result must be that it's dubiously grammatical. We would have to mark it with a percent sign "to show that it is judged well-formed (grammatical) by some speakers and ill-formed by others". (I am an American English speaker, in case this proves relevant.)

So, anyway, what's going on with this sentence, grammatically? Well, presumably you're familiar with a dependent clause — if not, uh, it's like a little sentence that lives inside another sentence. There is a certain type of dependent clause called a content clause. Wikipedia says of these:

they can serve as [...] object complements. In this [...] use, they are commonly postponed to the end of their main clause, with an expletive it [Dummy it] standing in their original place as subject:

It startled me that the students were so advanced.
It is important that we remember this day.
I find it sad that he doesn't know the answer.
It annoys me that she does that.

Here as before, a conjunction is almost always included, although it does not need to be that:

I like (it) when she comes to visit.

This Wikipedia page is apparently entirely without citations(?) so feel free to find it unconvincing. But it does explicitly consider both having and not having the "it" before "when" as grammatical in a sentence like this. I don't really know where to find a better source on this exact question. There's probably something about it in some scholarly grammar book somewhere.

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