Like, Unlilke, Dislike

I find the new Facebook buttons very useful. They come with innumerable possibilities of liking (which includes thumbs up, love and an over enthusiastic smiley) and disliking (which includes teary face and angry face emoticons) a post put up in social media and voice our opinions on it. I personally hoped that they had a thumbs down picture also to show ‘unlike’ (just to balance out the number of emoticons on both sides). The growing popularity of social media sites have made these terms—like, unlike—hugely popular.

My quandary with these terms however go much earlier, when I was around ten years old. At that time our school had this policy of starting second language learning—which is English—in class three. Since the usual age of getting admitted to class one (after the nursery classes) was age six, kids in class three were usually eight years old. We started typically with alphabets and words (mind you, half the kids in the class already knew these things because their parents taught them at home). So in the school we were basically refreshing our memory. Our first English teacher was one of the best teachers I have ever seen in my life. Patient as ever, she always used to answer our questions without the slightest hint of anger. Thanks to her, I genuinely grew a liking to the language.

Now fast forwarding to class five when I was ten years old. We’d already had several other teachers and they were fine too. But an incident that happened in one of the English language classes is still etched in my memory. It was a class test on sentence construction, writing meanings and the usual blah blah ‘fundamental English’ stuff. And one question among them wanted us to write the antonym for ‘like’. At that time the only knowledge of opposite or antonym I had was the prefix ‘un’. I used to think that by simple adding ‘un’ in front of any word, we will get its antonym. Going by this simple mathematical rule I wrote in the exam that opposite of ‘like’ is ‘unlike’. Here I should mention that ‘unlike’ is not a wrong word per se. But in its usage, ‘unlike’ is mentioned to refer to comparisons, or rather dissimilarities (e.g. ‘Unlike X, Y was good at sports’). So ‘unlike’ did not necessarily mean ‘not liking’ something/somebody.

As expected (not by me), the answer script came back with a cross mark on ‘unlike’. Like every other student craving for marks I asked my teacher to clarify. She said that the correct answer is ‘dislike’. At that time I did not have the nuance understanding of ‘unlike’ as now (please refer to the paragraph above), so I presented my previous argument that ‘anything with the prefix un is an opposite’. Sadly, both of us stuck to our positions. But I wasn’t giving up easily either! I went back home, checked the dictionary, found the word ‘unlike’, read that it may be used as opposite of ‘like’ too, photocopied the page as proof of my profound and correct knowledge of English language, and showed it to the teacher next day in class. And guess what? I got the mark for that answer!! No one was happier than me that day.

But as I grew older, I thought that maybe ‘dislike’ was a better answer.

However, now I am free of that worry because Facebook has come to my rescue. By popularizing the word ‘like’ and ‘unlike’ in their contrasting terms, it has given me the reason to claim that my answer in class five was indeed correct.

Now I hope future students won’t have to argue with their teachers in this matter.