“So Bob said […]” indicates that I am directly quoting Bob.
“Then Bob was like […]” indicates that I am paraphrasing Bob.
“And Bob was all […]” indicates that I am paraphrasing Bob, and additionally I am being a dick about it.
I don’t know about you, but I think it’s fantastic that we have a specific grammatical convention for that.
What I find most frustrating is when people don’t understand this! I don’t know if it’s a generation thing, but sometimes I’ll be talking and say “So I was like “are you fucking kidding me” and the person will look at me all horrified and say “you didn’t actually say that, did you?”
I said LIKE heidi keep up jesus
This is exactly why I, a Brit who doesn’t use ‘like’ as much IRL as I do online, use it. Sometimes the wording isn’t as important as the concept, and you can’t remember it exactly anyway.
Something I really loved about Black Panther is that it’s such a perfect example of how when you have a healthy number of women in a movie, there’s so much more freedom to have them behave and think and react in different ways, because none of them are bearing the weight of being The Female Character. You can show all kinds of different ways of being women without it being a statement on women in general the way it is when there’s only one female character.
