said

said

1. Said is used as an adjective in legal contexts to refer to something mentioned earlier:

• And you ceased to be the tenant and occupant of the said premises in the summer of 1915, did you not? —P. Ling, 1993.

Its extension into ordinary usage is normally affectedly jocular and often plain silly:

• Marks are awarded for wiggling one's chiffon-clad bottom to the said music —Punch, 1992

• One stained, rubber swimming-hat, with teeny holes scattered on its surface; one hook; one sadist [hair] stylist who yanks your crowning glory in clumps through said holes with said hooks —Independent, 2003.

2. Inversion of the normal order he said, they said, etc., is a standard stylistic device in reporting direct speech, especially when the speaker is identified by name rather than by a pronoun:

• ‘I shall go directly,’ said Judd. ‘I should not like to be marked out in any way.’ —Hilary Mantel, 1989.

More debatable, however, is the journalistic convention of using inversion as an eye-catching feature at the beginning of a sentence, e.g. Said a Minister: ‘American interests are not large enough in Morocco to induce us to…’. See inversion ¹.