Decree

[bloodyrosemccoy]

From now on, anyone who uses the words “quip” or “drawl” as a verb shall be slammed with a fine up to, but not exceeding, $250,000 and up to five years in jail.

Anyone who uses the words “quip” or “drawl” to describe a line of dialogue will be shot without trial.

That is all.

Comments

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

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!

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

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.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

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.