"I says"

[Mark A Mandel]

On Thu, 4 Apr 2002, Dale Coye wrote:

#You could also try a different verb to get the chatty effect--  'so I go..."
#or in the US today you'd be more likely to get "so I'm like, 'get lost!' "

But those, especially the latter, are very specific to time, place, and
population and would seriously clash with the character: uneducated
porten~o, iirc -- just what the writer is trying to avoid.

-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguist at Large