Bramblethorn
Sleep-deprived
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2012
- Posts
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Why don't you guys open up a few books and see what was allowed to be published.
I opened my pdf of Stephen King's Firestarter did a control/find for 'laughed' and never once was it used in place of 'said.'
Alright, that was one book.
So then I go to Stephen King's Different Seasons ... did a control/find for 'laughed' and on page 204 of the PDF I find this sentence from The Body
'Eeee-eeee-eeee, Gordie,' Teddy laughed. 'Go get the provisions, you fuckin' morphadite.' .... That was the only time.
Now his 1982 novel, The Gunslinger two examples.
“Of the town?” she laughed. “There isn’t enough of it to need a map.”
“Like the hawk,” Roland said. “It preys on you.” He laughed — at the startling appropriateness of the image rather than at any lightness in the situation.
Notice he does it both ways ... one '?' and a lower case 's' and one '.' and upper case 'H'.
Nightmares and Dreamscapes
'Oh, honey,' he said, and laughed again. 'Get out my face, okay?'
Nightmares and Dreamscapes
' "A war?" laughed Scarlett."Oh, fiddle-de-dee!"
These examples show you one thing ... It gets done every way in novels.
Cormac McCarthy doesn't even use quotation marks in his writing and his book The Road won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2007.
Just accept that all of you are right when it comes to tags.
Edit: I see Nezhul gave examples .... reinforcement then.
TBH I wouldn't be bothered by "laughed". It is at least a noise you make with your mouth, so it wouldn't bug me if somebody used it that way, even though it's not in Oxford.
But Oxford is a UK English source. Stephen King and his editors work in US English, so let's look at an American dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/laugh
Unlike Oxford, M-W does recognise "laugh" for use with direct speech. I don't know whether that reflects a genuine difference between US and UK usage, or just that two different groups of editors made different decisions about a borderline case. But either way, King at least has the backing of a US dictionary on that one.
M-W doesn't recognise "nod" or "shrug" with direct speech; any examples of those in (professionally-edited) print?