Katrina in Williamsburg, Virginia, asks if it’s pretentious to use the word said to describe something previously referred to. Using said to mean the aforesaid or the aforementioned is far more common in legal documents, but there’s nothing inherently incorrect about using it in other contexts, or using it in an ironic or jocular way in social media. In fact, speakers of English have been using said this way for more than 700 years. This is part of a complete episode.
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