Winston don't talk like a Prescriptivist Should

The "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" ad campaign was widely criticized in its day (1954-1972) for being ungrammatical, because, as the style guide to The Economist puts it: "like governs nouns and pronouns, not verbs and clauses. So as in America not like in America, as I was saying, not like I was saying, as Grandma used to make them, not like Grandma used to make them, etc.

"English has no 'unas' equivalent to unlike, so you must rephrase the sentence if you are tempted to write unlike in this context, unlike at Christmas, or unlike when I was a child. If you find yourself writing She looked like she had had enough or It seemed like he was running out of puff, you should replace like with as if or as though, and you probably need the subjunctive: She looked as if she had had enough, It seemed as if he were running out of puff.

Ogden Nash addressed the issue with the following poem, which was published in The New Yorker:

“Like the hart panteth for the water brooks I pant for a revival of
Shakespeare’s ‘Like You Like It’.
I can see tense draftees relax and purr
When the sergeant barks, “Like you were.”
And don’t try to tell me that our well has been defiled by immigration;/
Like goes Madison Avenue, like so goes the nation. — Ogden Nash

According to Jody Bruner:
"Walter Cronkite [that's Cronkite on the left], then hosting The Morning Show, refused to say the line as written, and an announcer was used instead.

"Malcolm Gladwell, in The Tipping Point, says that this "ungrammatical and somehow provocative use of 'like' instead of 'as' created a minor sensation" in 1954 and implies that the phrase itself was responsible for vaulting the brand to second place in the U.S. market. Winston overtook Pall Mall cigarettes as the #1 cigarette in the United States in 1966, while the advertising campaign continued to make an impression on the mass media.

"In the fall of 1961, a small furor enveloped the literary and journalistic communities in the United States when Merriam-Webster published its Third New International Dictionary. In the dictionary, the editors refused to condemn the use of "like" as a conjunction, and cited "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" as an example of popular colloquial use. After publication of Webster's Third, The New York Times called the edition "bolshevik," [see image at right] and the Chicago Daily News wrote that the transgression signified "a general decay in values."

"In 1970 and 1971, Winston sought to revamp its image and chose to respond to many grammarians' qualms with the slogan, "What do you want, good grammar or good taste?" MAD Magazine published a parody of this on the back cover of its January 1971 issue; set in a cemetery, it featured four tombstones who spoke in the past tense ("What did you want, good grammar or lung cancer?")"