differences - Using the present tense in recounting past events


There's a particular colloquial usage of the present tense in recounting past events that has a shade of meaning that I've been unable to put my finger on. As an example, instead of:



And then Bob said to her, "Sorry, I'm not going."



saying:



And then Bob says to her, "Sorry, I'm not going."



It seems to me that this expresses an attitude of mild disapproval toward the action recounted, by using the present tense. Further along the same spectrum might be:



And then Bob goes, "Sorry, I'm not going."



or even:



And then Bob is all like "Sorry, I'm not going."



What's a more linguistically sound way to describe what exactly is being encoded by this usage of the present tense?




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

word choice - Which is the correct spelling: “fairy” or “faerie”?