(Trudy, there is now a story I will someday tell you. You will be less alarmed than titillated, I warrant.)
Doyle ,'Life of the Party'
The Minearverse 3: The Network Is a Harsh Mistress
[NAFDA] "There will be an occasional happy, so that it might be crushed under the boot of the writer." From Zorro to Angel (including Wonderfalls and The Inside), this is where Buffistas come to anoint themselves in the bloodbath.
Crichton defenders of Polter Cow's ilk are dead to me.
People who don't put the hyphen in my fucking name are dead to me.
sticks tongue out at Gus, reads Jurassic Park for the fourth time
(ah, but will I be intensely jealous?)
Polter-fucking-Cow, alright?
Intellgent dude, P-C. Spends his Saturdays in the lab, making the future come true. If he wants to read the Harvey Comics version of science fiction in his off-time, that is his bidness.
Journalists are taught to use said because other verbs often imply a judgement about the person. I think said is usually transparent, so I tend to use it myself, but there are plenty of situations where other words are better.
Polter, you should take that to spoilers and delete here.
On the said issue, I've always preferred an attribution by action.
"No," the conductor's baton descended in a savage stroke and he turned to the first violin. "Did you study music in a cave? Play that line again."
No "said" in sight.
Also, as much as I love Cherryh's sf, she's one of the few writers who can do lyrical mythology and fantasy just as well as hard-edged science.
On the "said" debate, I was an English major and I'm in favor of variety or nothing. Said for every single quote is boring and often just plain inaccurate.
As Lyra said (commented), a good many words have a subjective meaning. Consequently, context is everything. I work right now for a mainstream daily newspaper. We're pretty insistent on using "said." And really, there's only so artsy you can get when covering a zoning commission meeting. Other places I've worked, most notably alt. weeklies and other places where the flavor of the moment is more important than pinpoint objectivty, my subjects were free to guffaw and caterwaul and spit through clinched teeth.
One of the joys of screenplays. No "said" anywhere.