bloodyrosemccoy

But I'm from the south, and when I'm around my family, I speak in a drawl.

Ah, I do not ban the drawl itself, and I do not ban its use as a noun. I ban things like, "Do you think these peaches got here all by themselves?" Nancy drawled. Bonus points if they add "playfully" to the end of that sentence.

Why, exactly, is this bad? It fully complies with standard English usage rules. Granted, it's a bit of a cliché, but if you go around killing people for that, you wind up with a classic extinction scenario.

Same as the argument I made below--it's grammatically accurate, but so are adverbs. When someone drawls a sentence, the author is usually trying to tell you "THIS LINE OF DIALOGUE WAS FUNNY." To me, it sounds like the literary equivalent of a laugh track.

The alternative, however, is to write it phonetically, and anybody who read X-Men comics in the 90s can tell you what an abomination Rogue's "SUTHUHN" accent was to read.

I seem to recall Little Orphan Annie had her dialogue written "phonetically," which meant droppin' th' g's off th' gerunds and writing things like "try t' go." The weird thing was, everyone speaks like that, but they apparently felt this made her look like an uneducated little kid or something.

That's why I allow drawl as a noun. "She spoke with a drawl" is a fine description, but a single sentence? Not so much.

If authors do it well, I kinda like phoneticized speech.

Funetik Aksent can be okay in small doses, but when it's used for a large portion of the dialogue, it can get really tiresome really fast.

Recently somebody posted some Pogo the Possum on scans_daily, and one of the Mexican members (whose English is excellent) just couldn't read it at all, because it's all in a thick Southern accent spelled phonetically (and abounds with punny malapropisms).

My solution for the story that Ilion is meant to appear in is typography: English (standing in for the main human language) would use a pretty standard comic book hand-printed font for native speakers, while Ilion would use a curvier, pseudo-cursive typeface (with maybe some italic calligraphy influence). An English-speaker speaking Ilion with a marked accent, or an Ilion-speaker speaking English with a mild accent, would have dialogue slightly curvier than the pure hand-printed look; an English-speaker speaking Ilion with a mild accent, or an Ilion-speaker speaking English with a marked accent, would be slightly blockier than the "pure" Ilion font. Ilion-speakers speaking English may also have some accent marks pop up in their dialogue, to show how they get the placement of stress wrong (Ilion has regular stress).

I like that! It's a lot more flexible than some of the other methods I've seen in comics (and actually in straight prose, too--Terry Pratchett uses Death's unique typeface to full advantage). My only concern there would be that readers could stumble over it if it gets too complicated--but I'm guessing that most people in your story would speak with similar accents, so you won't wind up with a different typeface for every person.

Yeah, there's really only three languages in the story: "English", Ilion, and the language of the Holopts (which I haven't named yet, but would have a pseudo-Cyrillic block letter typeface with serifs, and would make up a small fraction of dialogue).

While "phonetic misspellings" wouldn't appear, grammar would be affected by a character's native tongue. Someone with a mild accent (typographically close to the language's "correct" font) would probably not make errors very often, but may be slightly stilted; one with a strong accent would have difficulty with constructions that are very different from how their native language works, may use incorrect auxiliaries (directly translating the ones used by their own language), etc.

Holopts would be especially subject to this (since they're from far away and have little direct contact with either of the other groups), and their language is highly isolating with serial verb constructions and reduplication. The resulting errors would tend to reinforce the other cultures' stereotype of them as big, dumb, bloodthirsty barbarians.

Or perhaps that the character thinks that line of dialogue was funny.
Sometimes people speak in a drawl as a means of poking fun at people with a drawl, or stereotypes associated with drawls, while not actually normally having a drawl themselves.

I have now defended both quip and dreawl, and will run away to avoid being shot, fined, horsewhipped, drawn and quartered or slapped with a trout. :)

Living in an area where most people drawl, I always assumed it was the author's way of saying "This character sounds like a moron."

"That is all."

...she quipped.

::ducks::

*loads up the Nerf N-Strike Longshot* Prepare to meet your foamy doom.

I are am to have a drawleding

A quip is a funny comment, though. Depending on the line of dialogue, it could well be a quip.

Drawl, on the other hand, is inexcusable.

Yes, but when the author says "I tried to to play water polo but my pony drowned," quipped Hawkeye, it's as intrusive as a laugh track. The author is telling you it's supposed to be funny. If it's hilarious, you don't need to tell people that it's hilarious.

I agree with you. If you have to tell people it's funny, it probably isn't. I'm just a compulsive nitpicker and felt the need to point out that a quip is indeed an accurate description for some lines, though I'm not advocating using it as a verb.

However if it could easily be read as a straight statement, but the inflection is what gives it teh funny, then quipped is reasonable. As is deadpanned.

Of course, with Hawkeye (Alan Alda), if there wasn't a laugh track, no one would ever have thought him funny. (he quipped)

Aww, give Hawkeye a break. Ya gotta admit, his "It wasn't a chicken, it was a BABY" routine was hilarious!

Okay, I actually like Alan Alda, but I couldn't resist. >:)

I motion to flay alive anyone who overuses "drawl", especially, and slowly dip them in a vat of flesh-eating bacteria.

but qwp is still okay? like perhaps how I'd like to describe this post?

Oh, most assuredly! (I'm pretty sure the fact that "quip" came along before metaquotes started abbreviating "Quoted With Permission" is the surest sign so far that time is not entirely linear.)

And yes, go for it.

Meep! *was unaware that this was a grammar sin*

But I am so dependent on these for verbs and descriptions alike! There is nothing else in dialogue quite like a drawl or a quip. *flees*

Don't panic! It is not a grammar sin.

Mostly, I figure that if the line of dialogue is a quip, then the author need not TELL us it is a quip. You're probably good with a "said" there. (I had the habit of using a different verb for every line of dialogue, until I realized that was actually pretty confusing. Now I mostly use "say" and "ask," or do stand-alone dialogue. It's much less distracting.

AHA. Sounds fair and sensible. (I used to do the different-dialogue-verb thing all the time</>, and then eventually I went "...wait, no, despite the encouragements of elementary school teachers, this isn't actually improving anything by a large margin at all.")

*disagrees* We need all the alternatives to the verb "say" that we can get! Besides, some people do drawl, and it isn't always obvious from the spelling of their dialog! ... or something.
*gives up*

... Yesssss. I agree. What brought this on?

An incredibly bad book I'm reading for Sporking Purposes, and an extremely good book in which the author did it and pulled me out of the damn story.

(This bad book is incredible. I wish I could post the part where the main character googles something. But it takes five paragraphs. I'm not sure if that's over the excerpt limit.)

It doesn't involve the phrase "disappointed queeb sound", does it?

Thank god, no. It just involves a lot of snobby heritage-obsessed people who feel that polite ladies should not speculate about whether a married couple plans to have kids in public.

EDIT: She should not SPECULATE in public! I can actually SEE where having kids in public might be a bit of a breach of etiquette!

Damn late-night grammar.

Edited 2009-04-07 07:01 (UTC)

Wait, are you implying that you disagree with the idea that it's impolite to speculate in public about whether or not a married couple plans to have kids? Damn, I guess I'm a snob then, because that seems way out of line to me. :P I mean, obviously not the WORST breach of etiquette, but still, somewhat... crass, I guess?

... Yes? To look at a newly married couple and say, "You think they plan to have kids?" doesn't seem at all impolite to me.

But it is highly context-dependent. For example, assuming a couple wants kids and speculating about why they don't "yet," or delving into the mechanics of the kid-making process as pertaining to them personally, is crass.

Oh man. I love things that are terrible; I fully endorse going over the excerpt limit for purposes of feeding my fetish for 'orrible things.

I tend to hate it when authors use anything but "said" for dialogue tags, although there have been cases when I've seen "drawl" used well. I can tot them up using the fingers of one hand, but I have seen instances thereof!

"Quip" is ... not good.

When I write someone who has a very thick dialect, I try to keep to Standard Written English insofar as keeping the damn "g" on gerunds but feel that syntax is your best bet. A good example is the diction of Noish-pa in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books; Noish-pa obviously speaks like someone whose "common" is his second language, but there's no funny spellins or mangling of verb endings. He just places his words with care.

When I was but a naive schoolgirl, I had teachers keep insisting that you should under no circumstances use the word "said," because it wasn't interesting enough. For a while I used a veritable arsenal of Colorful Words, until I looked back over one particularly saturated conversation and realized, "This is ridiculous." I then learned that people who actually know something about writing, unlike English teachers, feel that "said" and "asked" should be the vast majority of tags for tagged dialogue--and that's if you tag the dialogue at all.

Perhaps I will post the great Internet Search Scene later! I get the feeling this book's target market is unfamiliar with the secrets of the intertubes.

I know what you mean--since I write stories set in a multispecies universe without the benefit of a Babel fish, I get a lot of dialects of the Common Speech--which because of physical differences between species, has both a spoken and a signed variety that are considered part of the same thing. English stands for both of them as well as it can, but it's not quite correspondent, so I sometimes have to play tricks like inventing plausible neologisms or using long descriptions where my character would use a single word.

Thing is, I like bits of linguistic milieu in my stories, so I stick them in a lot. But it depends on whether I want language to be the focus of the bit I'm writing. If I don't, I'll brush it off with things like, "He had a [slight/strong/whatever] accent" in an initial description, or "Roger couldn't make out what Elaine was saying because of her accent" without planting the line of dialogue. Every once in a while my characters may fumble for a word. (This is fun when it's my English-speaking humans fumbling for the word in Common, which is for all intents and purposes English.) Voice synthesizers for aliens who can't speak or sign have their own issues. If the story is about something else, I try to place a linguistic stumble naturally, so they are more a set piece without being distracting.

Yes, that was a fascinating and totally necessary story! Lucky you!

There's even a term for that sort of silliness: "said-bookism", after "said-books", little mini-thesauruses listing all sorts of synonyms for "said", which were sold out of magazine ads to aspiring yet naive writers.

Oh, I remember someone trying to push one on me at a book fair, actually!

Actually, a wonderful, weird little middle-reader book that helped me grasp the problem. Three Lives To Live is written as the narrator's seventh-grader's school project, and at one point her teacher "edits" the chapters she's written so far and tells her to rewrite a conversation from an earlier chapter with more of those Colorful words, and she writes a list of examples on the board. The narrator perfunctorily goes back to substitute random words like "coo" and "chirp" and "bellow" in there, which makes the conversation totally surreal and absurd, declares that she prefers the first version, then gets on with her story.

And also, I will swear up and down there is a book or essay or something on this topic out there somewhere with the memorable title, "Hello," He Pole-Vaulted. But while I always remember that title, I have no idea what it was and the internet, for once, fails me.

I'm with you on quip--there is no earthly reason to use quip as a verb, especially as a synonym for said--but I respectfully disagree with drawl. Yes, it's abused dreadfully, but it has its place and time, especially in the hands of a writer who knows his or her business. (Someday I hope to count myself as one of these writers.)

Perhaps one day you will convert me, but I have yet to meet a verbed drawl I like. I wish you luck! ;)

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