(no subject)

[conuly]

Just read a fic where there are no fewer than twelve different dialog tags in a row, not one of which is "said", "asked" or "replied/answered". (Or "null", which I guess would be not using a dialog tag at all.)

Most notably, we have X "chiming in" immediately after "affirming". You cannot "chime in" when you were the last person to speak! You'd just be chiming in to yourself. (And there's only two of them in this scene anyway, and I guess you can chime in in a two person convo, but would you really need to?)

Edit: Nope, most notably is "Hey" Y greeted. The word "hey" is a greeting. Unless you're using "greeted" here in the odd Scots sense of "wept" there is no need to reiterate that Y is greeting somebody else. And even if you feel there is such a need, it's a transitive verb. You can't just "greet". You have to greet somebody or something.

And it all started out so promisingly too, but I am losing it at this dialog! And there's just so much of it! With adverbs, even!

There is such a thing as too many adverbs.

Comments

[larryhammer]

I'm somehow reminded of M.E. Kerr's "Hello," I Lied.

[troisoiseaux]

I loved Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth as a child, but when I re-read it as an adult his habit of doing exactly this drove me slightly bananas. At least he had the excuse of teaching children new words...?

[conuly]

At least he had the excuse of teaching children new words...?

That's where this all starts. Some enterprising elementary school teacher, wanting only to broaden her students' vocabulary, tells them to stop using "said" in their creative writing.

Two generations of "said is dead" later, possibly including mock funerals, you have scads of young writers thinking this is good advice.

Alas, in English, it still isn't for most writers most of the time.

[jesuswasbatman]

Yeah, I'm British and I have the experience of having "never use 'said'" drummed into me in English class.

[larryhammer]

The practice way predates two generations. Check the pulp writing of a century ago -- it was endemic back then, too.

[conuly]

Nobody's ever claimed pulp writing is what your students should aspire to do. Heck, lots of times they've been discouraged from reading it.

[goljerp]

I have a friend who loved finding things like " 'You cad,' she hissed" in mysteries. I think there was a section on that sort of thing in the "Gun in cheek" books (by Bill Pronzini )

[sathari]

The habit of using transitive verbs without an object is something I've stumbled over more and more in fic these days and... no. Just no.

[pauamma]

Can you give an example of what you mean? The dialog description patterns conuly gave above all have an object, for all that they use the OSV order, so I assume you're referring to something else.

[conuly]

I suspect that's a specific response to "'Hey' X greeted."

There should be an object there - X is greeting somebody - but there isn't one.

Though I guess it could be one of those things that varies by 'lect. Probably is.

[pauamma]

Hmm. Maybe. Or perhaps it's grammar framing. To me, the utterance is the direct object. The person greeted would be an indirect object. (Dative instead of accusative in languages that have that system of noun inflections.)

[sathari]

What conuly said is exactly what bothered me. Some substitutes for "said"--- the whole "said is dead" thing being more or less the topic of the post--- are ones that, to me, require the author specify to whom they are said. You don't just "greet", you greet a specific [noun]. If you don't want to say to whom your character is speaking, use one of the ones that requires a prepositional phrase in order to be specific. It sounds like you might know a more precise grammatical/linguistic term for the thing that both conuly and I are talking about, and I would love to know it too!

[pauamma]

Elaborating on what I meant by "grammar framing": when the narrative includes the word or words used in greeting (as opposed to telling the reader a character greeted another without specifying what was said/signed/typed), some grammatical descriptions will make the greetee the direct object and the words used a complement of manner ("Alice greeted Bob using/with (some stock phrase)"), and others will make the words used the direct object and the greetee the beneficiary or recipient ("Dave said (another stock greeting phrase) to Carol"). This bears on which can acceptably be left unspecified or eliminated as the direct object is most often the one kept, what semantic role it has regardless. Is that clearer?

[sathari]

Okay, I think I get the grammatical conceit, it's just... rather antithetical to how I think about using words, especially for the purpose of storytelling.

[conuly]

Well, in this case the sentence is exactly as I wrote it, except with a name instead of a variable.

I'm sorry, but "X greeted." is just not a valid output in my dialect, and neither is "'Hey,' X greeted."

[pauamma]

Nothing to be sorry for. It's your dialect (and your language), not mine, so your notion of what is and isn't correct in it is definitely more reliable than mine. I'm also interested in how people form their opinion of what is or isn't correct, and thinking about or discussing grammar framings sometimes help me with that.

[sathari]

Yes, exactly that--- I should have used the handy "quote" button but was lazy.

Tangentially related instarant

[pauamma]

Strunk is decent, usable style advice. Strunk and White is (to borrow a description from Language Log) prescriptivist poppycock.

Re: Tangentially related instarant

[conuly]

White doesn't even take his own advice. Which is just as well, because if he did it'd be unreadable dreck, but still

Re: Tangentially related instarant

[pauamma]

Point.

[wpadmirer]

(bangs head on desk)

Lord have mercy on us all.

[maju]

My current pet peeve is somebody "chirping" something. It seems to come up far too often lately. Maybe I'm just reading the wrong authors.