“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?”
