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When I walk down the street now, no one looks at me with the same disdain as they used to.

When I walk down the street now, no one looks at me with the same disdain like they used to.

When I walk down the street now, no one looks at me with the same disdain they used to.

Are all these sentences grammatically correct? I am a little doubtful of the second sentence being grammatically correct, since most sources on the internet suggest that same as is what native speakers use in most contexts. "He's the same height as me.".

But the context here is different. And I've always been to consider the context, so here I am.

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If you are comparing two things, same ... as is the only grammatically correct option. So, your first sentence is correct and the other two are not. You could also say:

When I walk down the street now, no one looks at me with the same disdain. - implicit comparison

When I walk down the street now, no one looks at me with disdain. - no comparison

This sentence also works because it's equality rather than comparison.

When I walk down the street now, no one looks at me with the disdain that they used to.

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  • In your last example, is the usage of the word "that", preceding "they used to", mandatory for the sentence to be grammatically correct?
    – Pleep Ploop
    Commented Jul 14, 2020 at 5:07
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    In informal speech, it's OK to omit that as a relative pronoun. You will also see it omitted in written English, but I prefer not to. I this case, I think that it helps a lot when parsing the sentence, because it is already subject ellipsis... "look at me with" in the that-clause has been ellipsized, so there's not a lot left of the that-clause.
    – JavaLatte
    Commented Jul 14, 2020 at 5:34
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...no one looks at me with the same disdain as they used to.

The use of as in this sentence is correct.

...no one looks at me with the same disdain like they used to.

The use of like in this sentence is not correct, because like should apply to a noun, but is applied in this sentence to an action. However, this sentence is appropriate in vernacular speech, because native speakers are comfortable with the substitution of like for as, for many clauses.

...no one looks at me with the same disdain they used to.

Omitting as in this sentence is correct. However, in this case, the sentence is a shortened form of the one in which that connects to the two clauses ("the same disdain that they used to"). Practically, the meaning is the same.

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