An ordinary copper, who's patrolling his beat...

[venta]

Last night, walking through the railway station, I overhead part of a mobile phone conversation.

"And then, he proceeded to..."

That was all. The speaker's voice was fairly expressionless.

But it made me think: only two kinds of people in the world "proceed". One, policemen. Two, people you're pissed off with.

No one says, casually, in a narrative "... and then he proceeded to go to Waitrose, and bought me some flowers. Wasn't that nice?"

No, it's always "... and then he proceeded to go to Waitrose, can you believe the cheek of it?"

Presumably people just do nice things; but they proceed to do bad things.

Comments

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

I remember some writer saying that there are two forms of this - the whirling dervish (as you have described) and the morris dancer as in
'So she came up to me and said... so I went up to him and said' (I may not have got the phrasing right as I am more familiar with the dervish idiom).