Interesting English Fact:
With English borrowing so many words from so many other languages derived from the ancient proto-indo-european tongue, English uses about 50% of the words found in Sanskrit.
[sub]or so claims “The History of English” podcast[/sub]
“English” derives from the Anglen region in what is now Schleswig-Holstein, just south of Denmark. Thence, “Anglo-Saxon”. The spin on a billiard ball is properly known as “Angular Momentum”. It is all about the Angles.
I’m reminded of those who “feel badly” about things.
Someone is correctly described as “feeling badly” if he’s trying to feel up his date and is doing a terrible job of it. But if you feel bad or sad due to some misfortune, “feel” is not an action verb here but a description of a state of being; it’s technically a linking verb called a copula or copulative verb that links the descriptor back to the subject, and the adjective form is called for.
Having said that, this is different! “Wrong” is both an adjective and an adverb, and in this case is doing honorable duty as an adverb following an actual action verb. Thus, in the unfortunate dating situation cited above, the accosted female would be correct in saying “You’re doing this very badly”.
Why don’t we say “you’re doing it wrongly”, which is also correct? We could, but common usage has relegated “wrongly” to generally formal contexts, which is why it would sound a little odd to most of us and why we tend to associate it with legal usage, like “wrongly convicted”. Yes, I know, I should have said “such as” instead of “like”. Suck it up. 
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A few more random little things that may be of interest. At this point someone might say – especially in spoken conversation – “Well, did you think that was informative?” or “So, does anyone have anything else to add?”. So, why do we do this? What’s with the "well"s and the "so"s sprinkled like decoration all over our sentences?
I must admit that some people do it so often (especially with “so”) that it’s annoying, but (within reason) it’s neither wrong nor redundant in common speech. Try omitting it and see what you sound like. The words are a lead-in, a softening, an acknowledgement of the other person that creates a less formal and more amicable mood in the conversation. To a linguist, they would be examples of pragmatic markers, words or phrases whose value is modal (literally, “expressing mood”) rather than semantic. They add no meaning, but they enhance interactive discourse.
The final thing I’ll throw in here is a couple of comments about the uses and abuses of “I” versus “me”, the first of which is a rehash from another thread. Most of us cringe at the hypercorrected wrongness of “between you and I”, but what about “I wish everyone was more like I”? Most of us would say “I wish everyone was more like me”, even though the subject case seems the right one because of the implied “am”: “… more like I am”.
Turns out, we’re not the only ones who like the object form here. As Mark Liberman points out, so did Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet: “Doting like me, and like me banished”. Jonathan Swift, in The Lady’s Dressing Room: “He soon would learn to think like me”. Robert Southey, in his poem To Lycon: “And train the future race to live and act like me.” Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop: “… he told me about my mother, and how she once looked and spoke just like me.” As Liberman discusses, “like” takes a noun-phrase complement (“handles like a shopping cart with a wobbly wheel”), so as all these writers instinctively knew, the object case is the one consistent with this usage.
Then we have the interesting case of “Jane and me went to the store”, for which the teenage perp would likely get his knuckles rapped by an English teacher. I prefer “Jane and I” in this case, but Steven Pinker raises an interesting point. Forget about “I” vs “me” for a moment and change the tense, and you get “Jane and me are going to the store”. For the sticklers who insist we would never say “Me is going to the store”, one can point out that we would also never say “Me are going to the store”, yet here we are happily using the plural form when everything inside the phrase is singular.
The moral of the story is that the pronouns inside a conjunction phrase should be able to have a different case from the case of the phrase itself, just like the phrase can have a different grammatical number from the pronouns inside it.
All of this can be cheerfully acknowledged while still deploring abominations like the figurative use of “literally”. Don’t get me started – not in this thread, anyway.
“Literally” is well on the way to becoming a contranym, which will literally, eventually, carry both opposite meanings.
As for “doing it wrong” being incorrect, one could, possibly parse it as another of those compound verbs where the subject gets interleaved. The verb could be seen as “to do wrong”, which is normally intransitive, but in its transitive form, the subject (“it”) gets inserted into the middle of the verb. Hence, the sentence would mean that profligate adjective use is a harm or insult to “it” (good writing, or the language in general).
But probably not.
No. Each individual thing inside the phrase is singular, but the totality of all within the phrase is plural. That’s what “and” means. Would you say “Joe and Ben is going”, just because Joe and Ben are single individuals? The phrase describes two people. Plural.
Actually I would acknowledge that it’s been a well established contronym for a long time. But it’s still an exceptionally stupid one. Most contronyms are actually words with related meanings that share a common etymology that carry connotations better described as “related” rather than directly opposite. For instance, the word “go” is sometimes cited, because allegedly it can mean either to fail or to succeed bigly, as in “the badly stressed dam is starting to go” and “his business is really starting to go”, but the common thread is that in both cases it means that whatever the thing may have been about to do, it’s starting to do it now. “Quantum” is another, supposedly meaning both very big or very small. No, it means a discrete state, and by extension, a “quantum leap” is a transition to a qualitatively different condition and not just an incremental one. Housewives who dust their houses and bone their chickens are engaging in activities so commonplace and well understood that the negating prefix was dropped as a matter of convenience.
Or take the word “fast”, which is supposed to mean both “quick” and “stuck or fixed”. It has its origins in the Old English faest, “firmly fixed, steadfast”. This evolved in Middle English to the adverbial sense of “strongly” and “vigorously” and later to the now archaic “fast by” meaning “close” or “immediate” and later to the adjectival sense of rapid movement. This sequence of evolutionary transitions has now given it several different meanings that could be contrived to be “opposites” of a sort, but they aren’t, really. At no point in the evolution of English has “fast” ever meant “slow”. “Literally” as a figurative expression is fairly uniquely in a class of stupid all by itself.
I’m not sure what you’re saying “no” to exactly. Yes, the totality of the phrase is plural. Pinker’s argument is that exactly the same principle can be used to claim that the totality of the phrase is in the subject case without requiring that each pronoun in it also conform to the subject case.
This is Pinker’s argument, not mine, but I’m willing to concede it and not get my shorts in a knot over “Jane and me are going to the store” as I do with some other things. But frankly I think it’s a weaker argument than Liberman’s in the other example. “Everyone should think like me”, not “think like I”, and no, I would not recommend “correcting” Shakespeare to say “Doting like I, and like I banished”. 
I’d be surprised of there are any Latin words that English hasn’t borrowed, either directly or through a related word.
My fun fact: like can be used as 7 of the traditional 8 parts of speech. The exception is pronoun, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if someone found a way to use it as one of those.
If anyone does, it will totally be, like, a teenager, right?
P.S.- LOL.
As a light hearted bit of fun, I had to go copy down that stanza from the First folio, I took pity on everyone and changed the long ſ to s…but the rest is as the earliest copies have it.
*Pro tip: U and V are interchangeable.
*
And because it took me so long to come back and edit I found another part to add.
I am sorry to those who will find this painful, but I wanted to share the earliest known pre-prescriptive grammar version.
Gough[1] wrought thorough roughness, though – houghing and hiccoughing through Slough[2]'s sloughs and loughs.
[1] Surname – pronounced “Goff” [2] the town – pronounced to rhyme with “cow”
It gets all eleven, and sort-of makes sense…
abecedarian (plural abecedarians)
What I think is cool about this word is that word was created from the definition itself.
abecedarian = A-B-C-darian.
Finally I have a word to describe my academic accomplishments!
In that situation, “like” is in the role of a preposition. Prepositions do not take a subject-form pronoun. Try a different pronoun: “banished like they” or “banished like we” does not scan, unless you add a verb, turning “like” into a conjunction.
Conversations, by convention, go back and forth. Pauses may be taken as a signal that your turn is over and someone else can start talking. Soooooo, in conversations, these words take up time, allowing us to maintain our turn while we think for half a second about what we want to say next. It’s not accidental that they tend to crop up at the beginning of a sentence.
They’re not needed in public speaking, where the audience is not supposed to take a turn. It takes concentration and practice to trust your pauses and not use these crutch words.
If GH can stand for P as in Hiccough
If OUGH stands for O as in Dough
If PHTH stands for T as in Phthisis
If EIGH stands for A as in Neighbour
If TTE stands for T as in Gazette
If EAU stands for O as in Plateau
Then the right way to spell POTATO should be: GHOUGHPHTHEIGHTTEEAU
Slogging back to the angry/hungry/pedigree “discussion” (I’m late to this thread because I predicted the same as **RobDog **did), I’ve decided that the Yorkshire accent would perhaps pronounce those words different.
An-greh
Hun-greh
Ped-eh-greeeeeeee
Good on Yorkshire, they consistently pronounce *everything *different 
This is KIND OF in line with Darren’s clip of the guy saying “angry” but not really (he would have been able to explain it better if he meant “an-greh”) but since he’s from SC and not Yorkshire I still don’t know what he’s talking about
“Cede” and “concede” are synonyms, as are “flammable” and “inflammable”. That just doesn’t seem right…
“i” before “e”, except after “c”
I’m probably out of my depth here, not being a native speaker, but this whole discussion reminded me of the way Elvis Costello pronounces “angry” on I’m Not Angry, which sounds to my German ears like an-greh and distinctly different than I would pronounce “pedigree”.
Or sounded as “a” as in neighbor and weigh.