It’s all the same to us now, but more than a thousand years ago, Old English imported the Old Norse word “same.” It’s a word you probably use every day, but I’ll bet you wouldn’t have predicted that its actual definition is pretty long. It starts out “the ordinary adjectival and pronominal designation of identity…” and continues for a good bit. And there is something about “same” that’s a bit puzzling — it almost always comes after “the.” “The same” is so ubiquitous that without “the,” “same” actually sounds a bit odd.
It used to be worse, though. In the 1500s and 1600s “the same” was almost always followed by “that,” as in “Here he citeth many authors and dictionaries idly, to prooue that idolum may signifie the same that Image” (1582). For no particular reason, “that” was eventually supplanted by “as,” so today we’re used to saying “the same as” instead.
“Same” is such a useful word that you might wonder why it took so long for Old English to adopt it. I mean, as you go through a normal day, there are countless things that are, in one respect or another, “the same as” countless other things. The answer is that Old English already had a perfectly good word for that: “ilca.” “Ilca” wasn’t immediately replaced by “same” — it stuck around until about the 1500s. This was partly because “ilca” had another meaning; it meant a person whose surname is the same as the place he lives. That is, if your name was Jane Baker, and you lived in Baker, Iowa, you were “ilca” — or in later use, you were “of that ilk”.
In Scotland, “of that ilk” was even more specific; it meant the owner of the place or the head of the clan who lived there. Over time, “ilk” began to be used to mean people with the same surname, with the strong implication that they were related. Over even more time, “ilk” even relaxed about that — we still use “ilk,” but it just means some set of people or things that share one or more characteristics. The Countryman magazine, in 1995, printed “We have a peony of unknown ilk”, and Margaret Atwood used it to refer to people in her 2005 book Penelopiad: “Smaller fry, the table-tilters, the mediums, the channellers, people of that ilk.”
There’s a certain similarity between “ilk” and “like”, in the sense of “one of these things is not like the others.” So it probably makes sense to guess that “ilk” and “like”, having similar sounds and meanings, would also share original roots. But they don’t. “Like,” like “ilk”, comes from Old English (and they’re both even older than that), but while “ilk” and words of that ilk come from “ilca,” “like” and words like it come instead from “lec,” which didn’t imply similarity at all — it just meant to look at something. It’s the same old story: English is complicated, but come on, what’s not to like?
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