Noncompositional

Superlative descriptions like to be limited to a particular groups of things to be compared. People are best in their class, a mountain might be the tallest in the lower 48 states, and several things are no doubt the best inventions since sliced bread. Of course, something could always just be the worst idea ever. One way to express how you’re limited the domain of compared items is to use the phrase this side of X. Now, you can’t go around using this for just any sort of domain limitation. It works really well when you’re talking about geographically limiting the domain of comparison to…well, shouldn’t it be obvious? Here’s some old timey examples from the OED.

1840 T. C. HALIBURTON Clockmaker III. xviii, He is..the best live one that ever cut dirt this side of the big pond.

1914 Sat. Even. Post 4 Apr. 10/2 There ain’t a kid like him this side of the Hump [sc. mountain range in west of N. America]–nor t’other side either.

Big, or at least salient, geographic features seem to work well - oceans, mountain ranges, mason-dixon lines. Also good are salient locations. Nearby pizza favorite Zachary’s has been lauded as the best pizza this side of Chicago. A place at Tahoe seems to have the best mesquite tri-tip and ribs this side of Texas. Now, it’s not clear to me that these claims are about, for example, taking the area between Chicago and the SF Bay Area and saying that there’s no better pizza in that region. It’s rather that they’re picking a place famous for pizza (or ribs), and saying that their own pizza may not be quite as good (or authentic), but it’s pretty darned close.

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The other day in the class I’m TAing, the professor said, “by the end of the semester, there are ten questions that you should be able to answer like that.” That got me thinking, what is up with the phrase “like that” and its meaning, namely ‘with ease’. For one thing, it’s really hard to represent in writing. You could use typographic emphasis: he can do it like that. Or you could add a word to make it clearer: she finished it just like that. Or, you could notice that it’s sometimes (often?) accompanied by a snap of the fingers, so could have: “You should be able to answer it like that,” he said with a quick snap of the fingers.

And on that note: it seems likely to me that what we have here is a phrase that was at some point rather dependent on a concurrent snap (either timed with that, or perhaps, for dramatic effect, just before that) to make any sense, but over time the association became conventional enough that the gesture was no longer needed. And in fact you could say like that along with any appropriate gesture that indicates speed, ease, or some similar idea. It’d be interesting to see if, in the absence of any gesture, it is regularly or obligatorily replaced by some prosodic cue.

Then I checked the OED entry for like, and lo and behold, there was a meaning! But it wasn’t what I was expecting:

[...] of the nature, character, or habit indicated; spec. (usu. accompanying the crossing of the speaker’s fingers) as an indication that two people described are very friendly or intimate

The first written attestation for this use is from The Great Gatsby. For me, if I want to express that meaning, I’d have to use the finger-crossing gesture - no amount of facial or intonational gymnastics seems to get it quite right. Which is interesting, since my first associations with that particular gesture are the “hope” and “nyah nyah I can break my promise” meanings.