I don't believe I ever heard "sb.'s liking/loving sth." before McDonalds popularized it. I may have heard it from people who picked it up before I heard it directly from McDonald's though since I McAvoid. My first reaction was to wonder why people suddenly started sounding like they were speaking Indian English.

I wasn't loving it before McDonalds, I'm not loving it now, and I'm not going to be loving it any time soon (-:

Same.

And hello.

hi @Cerberus

McD might not have invented it but they caused it to go viral

but only in the present continuous

Indeed.

it took FB to get "to like" to go dynamic in the simple present (-:

whenever normal people use liking or loving I just hear McInfeced speech patterns

So do I.

Dynamic, and terminative, right?

hardly anybody gets my attempts to mock them either (-:

and I mean successfully in the same way a disease can successfully spread or a bomb can successfully detonate or an assassin can be successful

terminative?

@snailboat: i think it's much more usual to have emotional reactions to strange usage in your native language. something to do with why shibboleths have always been around.

Hmm were you mocking anyone just now?

@hippietrail In that case, I agree!

no not here just IRL (-:

Ow OK.

@hippietrail Having a natural ending.

You "like" someone, and then the action of liking has been completed.

Once the icon has changed.

i wouldn't say "liking it" is ungrammatical. clearly it's been standard in Indian English. I would say it's not standard. It goes against our native sprachgefuhl, it doesn't fit our semantics or match our idiom or something like that

and even though "loving" spread to "liking" it didn't spread to past or future continuous and other constructions or derivations like "disliking".

Doesn't that at least have mostly the same scope as "grammatical"?

colourless green ideas sleep furiously is grammatical

ebola successfully kills most people it infects is grammatical

"to like" / "to love" do have an -ing form, they're not defective verbs.

they just weren't used in an "I am in the process of loving this hamburger" way before.

My point is that what we find "grammatical" is that whose structure we do not find jarring or "bad" in some way.

no not at all.

Structure is sometimes related to meaning, but not always.

grammatical just means it doesn't break morphosyntactic rules

there are other kinds of rules and then there are norms which are not rules

That does not contradict my thesis.

to use ungrammatical another way would to me be a misnomer

Of course, there are other reasons than grammaticality why we may find an utterance jarring.

but then again there are plenty of accepted secondary senses of words which are technically misnomers yet everybody uses them

We may or may not find those jarring. We may or may not consider those to be about structure.

"ungrammatical" is a technical word with a technical meaning. "jarring" isn't. so at least within the field of linguistics we should use the former in its technical sense but we're free to use the latter however we like.

"to fall head over heels" is grammatical but jarring to some people because it doesn't make sense. "could care less" is another example.

I'm saying what is grammatical is ultimately based on jarringness.

It is also always limited to a certain group.

It does not exist outside the group, it is intersubjective.

then we need a new technical term for when something breaks the rules of morphosyntax since grammatical is already taken

might be worth a question on the site

ick! lots of published uses of "loving it" from the 1930s! google.com/…

i guess it was once popular but died, then Ronald and co. came back and raised it from the dead!

where by 'dead' I mean 'on sabbatical in India'

Haha.

Ick indeed!

Or eww, even.

Oh, interesting. And funny.

@snailboat Are you talking to me? Can you explain that?