There's a particular English class that almost every student for the past ten (twelve? twenty?) years has gone through. It happens usually around year seven or eight, when English teachers are trying to stretch students' vocabularies and teach them to think about what they're writing, rather than just plonking words on the page. It's a class that I (and a lot of other writers my age) remember vividly, now with anger, for the sheer amount of effort it's taken me to unlearn what I was taught then.

It's the class where they teach you that 'said' is an evil word.

You spend weeks writing little stories where characters will smirk, glare, grimace, giggle, stutter, yelp, flinch and gulp their way through conversation, entirely oblivious to the fact that out those verbs, only one is actually possible as an act of speech. I learned that lesson well, I excelled at finding new, exciting and frankly ridiculous replacements for 'said'. My characters managed anatomically impossible speech for years - right through my undergraduate arts degree (because apparently characters in literature can do whatever they want with their mouths while they talk) until I started writing fantasy again, and my writing group howled down my snickers, grins and guffaws with the equivilent of the rolled up newspaper.

I was suitably mortified. It's like discovering you've been spelling 'because' with only one 'e' for years.

I'm still breaking the habit - in drafts, I have to remind myself not to reach for the more 'interesting' verb. In my head, I can still hear my year seven English teacher chanting how dull a word 'said' is, how he never wants to see it in a story. And I really wonder what it is about poor old 'said' that has English teachers in such a twist.

It's an invisible word. A non-word, almost. When we read "No, thanks, I've had enough," Bill said, we barely even parse the 'said' - it just quietly identifies the previous speech as Bill's, and moves along. Replacing it with other, non-speech verbs - what my writing group refers to as 'said-isms' - does the opposite, it draws attention from the dialogue to the act of speaking itself. "No, thanks, I've had enough," Bill grimaced. We don't care about what he's just told us, we care that he grimaced. Aside from the fact that you really can't speak well while grimacing (go on, try it), if you're going to swipe the legs out of something as powerful as active dialogue like that, why bother having it in the first place?

Now, I don't disagree that having the same speech tag for every piece of dialogue - Bill said, Tom said, Bill said, Tom said - saps the energy right out, but that's an entirely different lesson, and one that (I think) is best left for older students - ones who've mastered most of their vocabulary, who've learned critical editing skills. I suspect - I hope, rather - that that's the lesson the English teachers are trying to get across. Or perhaps it's the problem they're trying to address. They're just unfortunately teaching bad habits in order to do it. But really, there's nothing wrong with 'said' - usually, it's exactly the word you want to use.

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