Introduction
Much serious linguistic attention is at present focused on recent and ever more extraordinary developments in the use of the ubiquitous like. In this article I want to take a more light-hearted look at the journey of what is it like? as a way of asking for a description.
It is extremely puzzling. How does it come about that we ask ‘what is it like?’ to request a description? Taken literally, the question is clearly asking for a comparison. But, undoubtedly, it is a description that it seeks, and gets: ‘What's the weather like?’ ‘It's cold and wet.’ (But that is not what it is like – that is what it is.) ‘What was the food like?’ ‘Delicious.’ ‘Tell us what the party was like.’ ‘Not very exciting.’ Moreover, as a description-seeking form of words, ‘what is it like?’ is apparently unique to English. Other languages typically use ‘how is it?’ to ask for a description, for example, French Comment est-il?; Spanish Cómo es?; Italian Com’è?; German Wie ist es?; Swedish Hur är den? And so on. The grammatical form of the question is unusual too, possible in English because we can use like as a preposition.
So, how did ‘what is it like?’ evolve in English as a way of asking for a description? Surely it must have begun as a request for a comparison? That would make sense. And indeed, by delving into literature databases (Library of the Future 1997; Literature Online) and tracing the use of the expression by writers through the centuries, it is possible to observe it developing from a comparison-associated question into our familiar description-seeking one.
Early examples of ‘what is it like?’ eliciting a comparison
In the 16th century, we find an instance in Tyndale's 1525 translation of Luke's gospel (spelling modernised), where the context is certainly comparison:
Then said he: What is the kingdom of God like? Or whereto shall I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden.
In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (c. 1600) there is this example, where a comparison is what is sought, and supplied:
But Helena in All's Well that Ends Well (c. 1602) leaves us tantalisingly in the air by asking the question and leaving it unanswered:
She uses the expression so beguilingly in the way we would ourselves that we hardly notice it. No wonder Shakespearean commentators pass it over without comment.
But Ben Jonson in one of his elegies (from the 1640 edition of his works) provides a solid example of the comparison-seeking use when he tells us what parting is like, comparing it to a sudden absence of sunlight:
And Christiana in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress Part II (1684) is at a loss for anything to compare the Fiend to when asked what it is like:
Methinks I see something yonder upon the Road before us, a thing of a shape such as I have not seen. [The Fiend appears.] Then said Joseph, Mother, what is it? An ugly thing, Child; an ugly thing, said she. But Mother, what is it like, said he? 'Tis like I cannot tell what, said she.
The writer John Hall Stevenson, a friend of Laurence Sterne, makes the following comparisons in explaining what the parts of government are like:
Emily, in William Godwin's Things as They Are (1794), has this unflattering comparison to make in the case of Mr Grimes, who has been suggested to her as a husband:
Mr Grimes is such a strange man. Why, I do not know what he is like! He is like for all the world a great huge porpuss.
The description-seeking function of ‘what is it like?’ establishes itself
It is not until around the turn of the 19th century that we get really definite hits for the description-seeking function of ‘what is it like?’. In the following example from Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811) it can hardly be a comparison of Mrs Ferrars to this or that that Elinor is curious about – she wants to know the facts about her personality and be able to describe her to herself:
Though she [Elinor] could now meet Edward's mother without that strong anxiety which had once promised to attend such an introduction … her desire of being in company with Mrs. Ferrars, her curiosity to know what she was like, was as lively as ever.
And it is a case for straightforward description – ‘even greyer’? or ‘white’? – when Byron in Don Juan (1819) is wondering about the colour of his hair in ten years' time:
The Brontes are quite at home with the description-requesting function of ‘what is it like?’ In these examples from Emily and Charlotte, a detailed description is readily supplied in reply to the question:
‘And what is my father like?’ he [Linton] asked. ‘Is he as young and handsome as uncle?’ ‘He's as young,’ said I; ‘but he has black hair and eyes, and looks sterner; and he is taller and bigger altogether.’ (Wuthering Heights 1847)
and
‘The ladies were magnificently dressed; most of them … looked handsome; but Miss Ingram was certainly the queen.’
‘And what was she like?’
‘Tall, fine bust, sloping shoulders; long, graceful neck: olive complexion, dark and clear; noble features; eyes rather like Mr. Rochester's: large and black, and as brilliant as her jewels.’ (Jane Eyre 1847)
Dickens is also happy with the description-seeking function. Here in Our Mutual Friend (1865) Mr Brewer, when asked what ‘that Sale’ was like, recounts the happenings at it:
Alice, in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), thinks she knows how to describe whiting when asked what they are like:
And here is another neat explanatory description from Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893):
Sherlock Holmes, in Conan Doyle's The Red-Headed League (1892), receives this detailed physical description of a man he's investigating, when he asks what he's like:
And the Whale in Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories (1902) gets this description from the ’Stute Fish when he asks what the flesh of Man is like as a yet untried taste:
Disapproval of the description-seeking ‘what is it like?’
However, ‘what is it like?’ has its critics. Anthony Trollope evidently thinks it an inapposite way to ask for a description. Here in Doctor Thorne (1858) he puts this response into the doctor's mouth when Mary asks what Louis Scatcherd is like:
Responding with a comparison instead of a description
Understandably enough, ‘what is it like?’ is sometimes deliberately taken literally and a comparison or likeness supplied in the response, even though a description is what is expected. In Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860) there is this exchange between Sir Percival Glyde and Count Fosco about Anne Catherick:
Sensory variations on ‘what is it like?’
We are not restricted merely to ‘what is it like?’ to ask for a description. To request a visual, tactile, mental, auditory, gustatory or olfactory impression we can ask ‘what does it look like, feel like, sound like, taste like, smell like?’ See, for example, Jane's request to know what John Reed looks like, in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Bessie's disparaging description:
So too Master Tom's bloodthirsty desire to know what his captured bird will taste like, in Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey (1847):
Also Anne's experience of what distrust feels like, in L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908):
I know what it feels like to have your word doubted.
and Professor Higgins's despairing declaration that English spelling makes it impossible to know what English should sound like, in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1913):
The English have no respect for their language … They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like … German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen.
Description-seeking alternatives to ‘what is it like?’
If ‘what is it like?’ did not establish itself as a description-seeking question until about 1800, how did English elicit a description before this time? Evidently, as with other languages, ‘how is it?’ was used – and continues to be:
And, for all those other impressions, you can ask ‘how does it look, feel, taste, sound?’:
In addition, there is a choice of the description-seeking devices ‘what kind of?’, ‘what sort of’, ‘what manner of?’:
Incidentally, ‘what sort of?’ generates an oddly inelegant request for a physical description: ‘what sort of looking person is so-and-so?’, to be found, for example, in the following two passages, the first from Jane Austen's Emma (1816) and the second from George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871):
The usage may sound awkward to us, but it must have been absolutely acceptable, because the speaker in the first example is consciously correct Emma herself and, in the second, it is socially aspiring Rosamond Vincy.
Conclusion
Inapposite as it may be, ‘what is it like?’ is what we predominantly use to ask for a description. The inappositeness, when you think about it, is compounded in the question we ask when we want to know the real truth about someone or something: ‘What are they really like?’ ■
ANNE SEATON comes from the Isle of Man but has lived most of her life in Edinburgh. She read Classics at Oxford University, then joined the staff of the National Library of Scotland, working with pre-1600 foreign books. After marriage and the birth of two sons she became a lexicographer with W & R Chambers of Edinburgh and was involved in a variety of native-speaker and EFL dictionaries, specialising finally in EFL grammar. She now freelances, preparing grammars and dictionaries for the Singaporean and Indian markets. Email: anneseaton@ednet.co.uk
