- 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?
asked Aug 23 at 14:19
-
2As a British English speaker I don't find the first one idiomatic.– Kate BuntingAug 23 at 14:58
-
2People 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.– FumbleFingersAug 23 at 15:43
-
1In 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 PippikAug 23 at 16:09
-
2@DrMoishePippik I suspect that your ngrams include various unrelated usages. (For example, "That's what it will look like when it's done.")– MarcInManhattanAug 24 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.– LambieOct 25 at 14:08
Add a comment
|
2 Answers
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.
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?!
