OK, so I am no deer expert

The "long" run again. After a very short sleep due to particularly unpleasant insomnia. It was warm, I was tired, but the movement is... not at all pleasant... but maybe somewhat consoling... I don't know. Maybe it's just the "virtue".

Up the track where I saw the hare - or possible hare - a few days before, I saw a deer. The body was bright red-brown and the ears were so long that at first I thought it might be a monstrous hare giant! Then I thought, red deer! I know, from the man I met a few weeks back, that red deer d pass through this part of the country occasionally, so I texted him.

Later he called, kindly saying that roe does can, with their big ears and red bodies, look like red deer hinds at this time of year. Yes. Much more likely.

I took the picture on the front page because the feathers of a pigeon, probably caught by a sparrowhawk, scattered among those flowers (related to chamomile I think) looked like a sort of added downy bloom.

That made me think... we use the word "likely" to mean "probable"... in the past, I think "like" had some additional or different inflexions. I mean, we use it to mean "similar" and we use it as a verb to mean "approve/love" but I think it also had another meaning. Let me ask the ChatGPT who, it reminds me, can make mistakes...

This is a long response, but interesting.

Yes. You're remembering something real, and it opens onto a fascinating history.

Today we tend to think of like as having three main meanings:

• similar to ("like an oak")

• to find pleasing ("I like trees")

• likely = probable

But historically these were not as separate as they seem.

The Old English word was gelīc ("like, similar, corresponding"), from Proto-Germanic galīkaz, meaning having the same form, body, or appearance.

However, there was another important semantic strand that has largely disappeared.

1. "Like" as "fitting, appropriate, proper"

In Middle English, like could mean:

suitable, fitting, proper, appropriate.

You find expressions like:

• It is like that... meaning it is fitting/proper that...

• As was like... meaning as was appropriate.

This survives faintly in Scottish English, where likely can still mean good-looking, pleasant, agreeable, not merely probable.

2. "Likely" originally meant "having the appearance of"

This is perhaps the meaning you're sensing.

Originally likely meant something like:

having the appearance of being...

For example,

"He is likely to win"

didn't originally mean

"there is a high probability..."

It meant something closer to

"He has the appearance of one who will win."

That is, probability was inferred from semblance, not from statistics.

This older sense survives beautifully in Shakespeare. When someone is described as "a likely fellow," it often means:

well-formed, promising, of good appearance.

Not merely statistically probable!

3. Connection with "likeness"

All these meanings cluster around appearance and correspondence:

• likeness

• alike

• likely

• like

They belong to a family concerned with resemblance, fitness, and seeming.

Only later did "likely" become almost exclusively a word of probability.

4. There is another old sense...

This one is particularly interesting.

Middle English liken meant

to make aliketo compareto represent

Hence Wycliffe's Bible has forms like

"likened unto"

meaning

made comparable to, represented as.

This survives in the Gospels:

"The kingdom of heaven is likened unto..."

where "likened" means much more than "is similar"; it means is represented through this image.

I suspect this interests you because of something you've been circling in your own writing. Modern English tends to divide:

• similarity,

• affection,

• probability,

into separate conceptual boxes.

Older English held them much closer together.

Something was likely because it looked like what would happen.

Something was liked because it was congenial, fitting, agreeable.

The root is less about abstract probability than about correspondence.

Given your interest in Old English, there's another related word you might enjoy: gelīefan ("to believe") and gelīc ("like") are different roots, but Old English often treats knowledge as arising from recognition and fittingness rather than from detached calculation. That feels very close to the distinction you've been developing between different modes of knowing—where one kind of knowledge is not merely the accumulation of facts but a perception that something answers to something else.

In other words, "likely" once carried an echo of "it bears the right form." It wasn't merely a prediction; it was a judgement of congruence between appearance and expectation. I think that's the lost inflection you're remembering.