Your compiler may be the most mechanically challenged person in history, and the other Saturday was confronted with having to get a flat tire off his wife’s rather new 2024 model car. He tried in vain with the short little lug wrench that came with the car, then tried with his hydraulic hammer drill. When none of that would move the lug nuts, he broke down and called a tow truck to haul the car to the tire store. When the driver got to your compiler’s house, he said, “Let’s see if we can break those loose first and save you a towing charge.”

He got out his hammer drill and got the same result as your compiler had with his own. Then he went to the tow truck and brought back the mother of all ratchet wrenches—one with a stout handle that looked to be at least two and a half feet long. With all the considerable leverage one can put on such a long handle, he was finally able to break loose the lug nuts. He looked up at your compiler and said, “We liked to have NEVER got those off!” We were truly almost unable to.

Your compiler got to wondering about that emphatic old phrase, which sounds Southern to his ear. It means “almost did not” or “nearly did not,” but contains a sense of accomplishment and relief that those two generic phrases lack. (And perhaps it should be “Like to have never,” which sounds like how we say it, but as it is always used in the past tense, “liked” seems more appropriate to your commentator.)

Continuing with the mechanical travails of your compiler, he lives on a large rural property that requires regular mowing in order to look nice, and he must occasionally replace a belt on his large riding lawn mower. While he would sooner have nasal surgery on the forest floor with a sharp stick, his sense of economic stewardship will not allow him to hire out that small chore he is perfectly capable of doing himself. So when he can finally put it off no longer and goes out to change said belt, he is liable to tell his wife on coming inside after his exertions, “I liked to have NEVER got that belt changed!”

Come to think of it, “liked to have” can be used as a synonym for “nearly” or “almost” in virtually any situation where a prodigious effort was involved and needs to be communicated, or where a significant danger was barely averted, or where something just took a long time—nearly forever. The crisis-aversion usage can be illustrated as follows: “I wish you had told me you had the kitchen knives sharpened. I liked to have cut off my finger just now.”

Both uses can perhaps be further amplified by the following example. Your compiler might tell someone: “I liked to have never learned how to use certain basic aspects of technology. I stand firmly with the late Lewis Grizzard, who once wrote regarding computers that if he’d wanted to be a mechanic, he’d have gone to Georgia Tech. Then when I finally got a rudimentary understanding of technology—sufficient to make me nothing more than slightly dangerous in the presence of a computer—it liked to have took a twenty-mule team to get me on Facebook. But all these years later, my wife says it might-near takes a twenty-mule team to get me off Facebook these days!”

Admittedly, “it liked to have took” sounds a bit off. Your compiler believes that is because most of us had, “Don’t say, ‘I seen,’ ‘have went,’ or ‘have took,’” along with a nearly infinite list of other grammatical instructions drilled into our minds as youngsters by family and teachers alike.

But let us look at the sentence, “It liked to have took three days.” An exact synonym would be, “It nearly took three days.” It is the subject, took is the verb, three days is the complement, and nearly is the adverb—basically an adjective for a verb. Changing the adverb from “nearly” to “liked to have” should not change the tense of the verb in your compiler’s humble opinion—that would be like a tail wagging a dog—so he posits with reasonable confidence that, “It liked to have took three days,” is a grammatically correct sentence.

At least that is the story he is sticking to.