“Says” Instead of “Said”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Ben calling from New York City, and I’m 18.

Welcome, Ben. What can we do for you?

Thank you. So I was listening to your segment about paying attention to the way in which our older family members speak.

And I was kind of thinking about, you know, what are some ways that my grandparents speak?

And I was trying to think of something.

And this thought popped into my mind, which is that whenever my grandmother retells something that happened to her in the past and uses dialogue, she uses says, the present tense, instead of said, the past tense.

And I thought that was really strange because for the most part, she uses says when she’s talking about herself, such as I walked into the store and I says X, Y, Z.

And I was a little confused, you know, why she said something like that.

And I was wondering if this is just a strange little irregularity that she has,

or if it’s something more widespread and well-known of older generations using the present tense when telling stories instead of the past tense.

Great question.

And you’ve given us a really great example of how that kind of speech works.

She’s American?

Yes.

And how old would you say she is?

She’s early 70s.

Early 70s.

Well, it’s nothing to have to do with her in particular.

Is she from New York also?

Yeah, she lived in Brooklyn for a long time and now lives in New Jersey.

Yeah, there’s nothing particularly regional about it.

It’s a form of probably best described as the historical present tense.

Now, usually we only encounter this in English in two extremes of formality,

either in very informal language, like the stuff that your grandmother is saying,

or very formal language, like scientist recounting a historical event of some great importance.

And that word recount is the key here because that’s what your grandmother is doing as well.

She’s recounting previous speech.

It’s called reported speech in linguistics.

And we tend to use this what sounds like the present tense in order to give it immediacy and make it seem vivid and like it’s actually re-happening as we’re telling the story.

It actually makes it feel more real to the hearer.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

I think when she tells stories, it doesn’t matter if it’s very far in the past or something that happened earlier that day.

But it does make you feel that it is it’s happening to you or you’re very much engrossed in that story that she’s telling.

Yeah. And there’s a cool thing about that. I do feel like you kind of nailed one part of it.

I think it’s passing away, at least in these informal, very informal uses.

It does seem to be marked as something from a previous generation.

I’m actually surprised that your grandmother is as young as she is and still using it,

because that’s how archaic it seems to be becoming.

But perhaps my information is wrong, and perhaps it’s still far more widespread than I believe.

For some reason, it reminds me of younger people using the term like to introduce a similar kind of scene,

something that’s similarly present tense.

I was like, did it?

Yeah, because they’re both reporting on speech.

Right.

So the like is a quotative and the says isn’t a quotative exactly.

But certainly they’re definitely talking about a previous situation in a really informal way.

Yeah, it’s kind of this performance-y kind of thing.

Well, that’s good.

That’s a good word for it.

Then we do a lot of speech that we talk about.

So we recraft it as if it is a narrative and tell it like a story and act it out.

Our hands are going and our faces are making grimaces and smiles and so forth.

And, yeah, it’s cool.

Just for a historical perspective, there are records of this kind of speech going back hundreds and hundreds of years.

So it has existed in English for quite a while.

That’s very interesting.

I never have heard of something like this.

Yeah, very observant.

Yeah.

The last time I encountered it was with an 80-year-old woman in the Lower East Side of New York.

There was a woman named Helen who was homeless there

who would sit on my front steps.

And she was originally from Boston,

but she’d lived in New York for like 50 years.

And she would just tell me stories.

I lived on 2nd Street between Avenues B and C

and the Lower East Side.

And she always had that same exact construction.

She’d be like, so I says to him,

you can join the Navy, but I ain’t waiting for you.

It was really good.

Ben, thank you so much for the question.

Thanks for taking it.

I really appreciate it.

I love the show.

Take care now.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

So I says to myself, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.