Ah ha, boy, say’st thou so?

Fred R. Shapiro digs into movie misquotations that have made their way into everyday language, albeit sometimes distorted. It is almost a pity that Mae West never spoke the line "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me."
Quoting and misquoting have become almost as common as speaking and misspeaking. Yet, it is not always the correctness of a quote – or its incorrectness for that matter – that ruins a cited line. More often it is the way in which a writer implements quotes in his own text. So, let’s just haggle a little bit with The Haggler, David Segal.
Segal’s piece One Compliment, But Two Complains investigates Samsung’s wanting customer service. One Mr. Fowler seems to be among the luckier ones.

Mr. Fowler said the company called him twice in one day. ‘What would it take to make you completely happy with Samsung?’ Mr. Fowler said a case manager asked him. ‘A total refund,’ Mr. Fowler said he replied. Instead, Mr. Fowler said the case manager offered him a six-month extended warranty on the new DVD player, which soon arrived in the mail. Mr. Fowler says the DVD works perfectly.
… And what of that irksome three-repair policy? Samsung said that “while we do have a guideline that says a product should be exchanged after three repair attempts, the number is meant to be a maximum limit,” not a minimum.
Mr. Wong [another customer], meanwhile, had already heard from Samsung. … A Samsung employee called to offer a $50 Best Buy gift certificate, Mr. Wong said. Actually, the employee called to say the certificate had already been sent via FedEx.’If they had asked, I would’ve declined,’ Mr. Wong said by e-mail.

Ah ha, boy, say’st thou so? (Hamlet I.V)

The Haggler invites everybody to send him an e-mail, but “keep it brief and family-friendly, and go easy on the caps-lock key.” Dear Haggler, go easy on those s-a-y keys!


What you can say instead of say:
acknowledge, add, adduce, affirm, allege, altercate, argue, articulate, ask, assert, believe, call for, challenge, claim, clarify, compare, connclude, consider , contradict, contend, convey, debate, declare, defend, deliberate, describe, differentiate , disclose, discuss, dispute, distinguish, divulge, elucidate, emphasize, enumerate, estimate, examine, explain, expound, expose, express, focus, illuminate, illustrate, imply, inquire, insist, interpret, introduce, justify, maintain, mention, note, offer, opine, points out, pose, posit, postulate, present, profess, pronounce, propose, prove, provide, put forth, relate, remark, render, report, require, reveal, show, state, suggest