Said-isms

[rolanni]

All righty, then.

I just read a reader review of a book (not one of ours) in which the reviewer was bitching and moaning about all the said-isms in the book. People never just said anything, the reviewer complained (um, oops), they whispered, murmured, hissed, cried, mumbled, &c -- and everyone knew that was Just Wrong.

Well, I'm going to 'fess up; I didn't know that it was wrong. And I'm going to go one step farther; "said" is an awfully boring word. Oh, it has its uses, and use it I do. But, honestly, if someone has murmured, why not say so? If she mumbles, or stammers at a certain point, that might, yanno, be a Clue. I'd think a whole page of dialogue broken only by "said" would put me right to sleep. Granted, I could be in a minority here.

So, I have some questions.

The first is, where do you learn that "said-isms" are "wrong?" and how come I never got the memo?

The second is, what are your feelings about "said-isms":

[Poll #1222698]

or -- feel free to discuss in comments.

Comments

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

There's nothing wrong with murmuring when the character is murmuring. The problem is when he murmurs to avoid saying, or when the author clearly thinks that she can avoid the "talking head" syndrome of uninterrupted dialogue by coming up with increasingly inventive and unlikely verbs instead of "said," without including any other description or action.