You might try some of that layered, Gloucester-and-Stilton stuff, too--I like it on a butter cracker.

The stinky cheese rules. Gorgonzola and stilton especially.

Do people say "I'm liking ___" or "I'm feeling ___" instead of "I like ___" and "I feel ___" because of those McDonald's commercials, or is there some other source for this grammatical butchery? (I'm not picking on you, TheDonF, I just wonder about it sometimes, and this is the thread in which I'm taking it to the mat).

There's a mild French cheese, somewhere between camembert and roquefort, that I'm a big fan of, called Montbriac Rochebaron. The outside's coated in ash. It's reminiscent of cambozola.

I love a salad with butter lettuce, dried cranberries, a bit of thin sliced red onion, and crumbled blue cheese. A simple toss with oil and a mild vinegar is all it needs.

HJ: God, I hope that's not where I've got that from. I'm also really, really trying to stop saying "Can I get..." because that's equally as bad. The answer to "can I get a pint of beer" is likely to be "well, if you want to walk behind the bar and pour yourself one, then yes you can".

Oooh, keep on going with the blue cheese recommendations. And yes, crackers are awesome. I love crackers, with or without cheese.

Do people say "I'm liking ___" or "I'm feeling ___" instead of "I like ___" and "I feel ___" because of those McDonald's commercials, or is there some other source for this grammatical butchery?

There's nothing wrong with it. Notice how you can say "I'm enjoying cheese more these days" and "I enjoy cheese more these days", and they each have a slightly different meaning: the first implies that your enjoyment is still increasing today, while the second implies that your enjoyment has increased in the past to the level it is at today.

If that's how you're hearing it, and that's how you're rationalizing it, then you're feeling free to be doing with the language whatever you're wanting to.

"To like" implies continuation, and "to like more" implies a continual increase. There's no need for the "-ing," those are redundant, and just make it easier to not think about what we're saying, the way there's no need for the extra syllables in "utilize" or the epenthetic schwa in "athlete." I'll stick with the English I read in books.

Not the kind I'm hearing on TV.

Last week I had the good fortune to taste some Maytag blue cheese. It was so good, I couldn't stop thinking about it all night. Seriously. I just kept saying to myself, "Goddamn, that was some really good cheese. I love cheese. Cheese makes life worth living!"

Oh God, yeah, I love cheese. I had, for no other reason than I wanted it, a large sandwich today: mature Irish cheddar with sweet, spicy tangy pickle on malted granary bread. Heaven. Why does it have to be so unhealthy?

Don't make me sic languagehat on you, HJ...

Anyway, yes, cheese = good.

TheDonF: Sounds like a Ploughman's Lunch. A sharp, salty cheese is unbeatable paired with Branston pickle. The blue cheese I had was served on a cracker with some fig spread. Sort of the same concept behind a Ploughmans.

I love fig spread with the right cheese.

Also wonderful: marscapone on a water cracker with jalepeno jelly.

I had mascarpone polenta with pork chops once. it was delicious.

Stilton and pears. Mmmmmmm.

Gorgonzola with carmelized onions, garlic and walnuts over pasta.

Branston is okay, but there's plenty of other amazing pickles. I've made my own before with Balsamic vinegar onions, peppers, chilli, muscovado sugar, garlic... Good that was good stuff. Mmmmm..... Fig spread, though, I haven't tried. Sounds like it could be a winner.

Mascapone is amazing. Make a tomato sauce with onion, garlic, tinned chopped tomatoes and fresh basil. Throw in a tub of Mascapone and you're in heaven.

I had a really interesting blue cheese the other day on a cheese board from a local restaurant.
Instead of the standard blue they normally serve this one was like a hybrid of blue and brie. So good, I wish I knew the name.

Was it Cambozola?

Note to self: read entire thread before posting.

*hides under desk*

warning! Non-cheese derail:

About the "liking": It seems like this construction has been used informally to some degree for a long time (as in "how are you liking the neighborhood?" to someone who recently moved in next door), but has increased with widespread internet use. The McDonald's campaign began in 2003, but if you search "I'm liking" or "I'm loving" and "2002", you will find plenty of examples that predate it. For example, "I'm loving Multizilla, the tabbed interface tool for the Mozilla browser". Most often (or perhaps, most usefully) it seems to be used when a person is assessing something but isn't quite ready to pronounce an opinion - especially new software or a new game.

Another example from 2002: "So instead I went out and switched to Cingular wireless, which I'm liking a lot. I really like my Ericsson phone." So far he likes the Cingular wireless, but as he continues to use it, he may find problems that aren't immediately apparent. The Ericsson phone, on the other hand, is a product he has used for some time and he knows that he likes.

While the McDonald's ads may certainly be responsible for upping the "liking/loving", etc. usage even more, I think they originally borrowed from a current trend instead of vice-versa. In its more common, real-life use, it does make a sort of handy distinction as a breezy way of saying "I'm assessing it; so far I like it."

also, I'm hitting that. :)

Also, as one who's in the midst of rewatching Buffy, everyone there is always lovin' everything. Lovin' the new do. Not lovin' the attitude. Etc etc etc.

Stinking Bishop... now there's your cheese.

Can you get proper unpasteurised cheese in the states?

Isn't blue cheese just "overripe" brie? So the cheese that's between a blue and brie is just half ripe blue? This has its own name? Please help me to learn my cheese family lines.

Cheese is the reason I could never be vegan. I love it far more than I think a person should?

That's supposed to be a "." and not a "?" at the end of that last sentence. I'm not asking, I'm telling. :P

Jimmy Carter, 1984: "I'm liking the work" (about a Habitat project)

Kid on NewsHour, 1995: ("What do you think about [art stuff on camera]?") "I'm liking it."

I think those illustrate the two ends of changing usage taz mentioned.

It does imply a provisional judgement, but it also implies active attention. Not just something you like, but something you spend time thinking about and looking forward to more of.

But here: by 1999 the WaPo wine columnist (how chi-chi!) was saying (in a chat) "Today, I'm liking the wines I taste from producers like [xyz], and I'm finding that the general level of quality is again quite high for the money." Juiced up with a little parallelism to prove he was edumacated at kolidge.

I don't know that it's really an onlineism so much as it is a youth culture thing. Attention economy and all that. "Liking" has fallen away as a lifelong attribute and become something we do temporarily as we try to try everything, flash through the 500 channels.

It's just an encroachment of casual speech on written language. I guess it's fine. But it goes hand in hand with other grammatical inroads (the abandonment of the conditional tenses in sports journalism, for example: "If he hits Manning, the game's over," referring to a play that just happened -- sure, it's more words to say "had hit" and "would have been," but those words are the right ones, they're there for a reason, and conjugating every verb in the present tense leads to misunderstanding). I'm nervous about the language, not because I don't want it to change, but because I want to be able to communicate with people as best as I can, and we have this wonderful 500,000+-word language with all these neat usage rules for just this purpose.

"I'm liking ___" isn't the worst example of this, but it bothers me to hear the otherwise well-spoken say it. The assertion that more meaning can be carried by saying "I'm liking ___" than "I like ___" is iffy. That's really not how it's used in anything but after-the-fact justification. But what gets me the most is that even if it is used, as its defenders say, to bridge the gap between starting to like something and actually liking it, then there must be a whole bunch of people out there conditioned so deeply to hem and haw that they can't even commit to liking the food they eat (and by "liking" I mean "liking," not "liking." See?). Informal usage of it doesn't prove its worth. People say all sorts of things because they sound cool, but look back twenty-five years later and scratch their heads, saying, "Grody to the max? What were we thinking?"

It's true, there's little point to my bringing this up on the internet, where people (myself included) write with a looser style, one much closer to spoken English, than they would otherwise. Gradually, however, internet and email writing looks to overtake more formal writing as the most common form of written communication. What then? Do we lose the rules that help us communicate and keep us from sounding like fools?

I can only hope this onslaught keeps away from the books I like to read. I'd hate to have to put down a book for "I'm liking ___," but I would; more's the shame.

Oh boy, back on track: My current favorite blue cheese of all time is Saint Agur -- French, creamy, and oh so yummy.

I was making spaghetti bolognese with my niece (just under 2 years old) and had the cheese box open on the side. I turned round to find her grasping a massive chunk of Campozola and taking huge bites out of it. So I moved that. Then she grabbed the strong Irish Cheddar and started munching that. So that got moved. Finally she grabbed the Parmesan and started gnawing on that. Luckily, I'm not the one that's going to be changing her tomorrow morning!

Isn't blue cheese just "overripe" brie? So the cheese that's between a blue and brie is just half ripe blue? This has its own name? Please help me to learn my cheese family lines.

Nooooo, blue cheese is its own thing. Check out the Wikipedia entry on it with a huge list of different types.

Awwww, Hugh, you're so cute when you're being prescriptivist!

Language is changing all the time. It's fun to watch, coming and going.