‘Bit’ and ‘just’ are two narrative components that have hit the cutting room floor, so to speak, in the editing process. I must use them in my own thought processes, because they both featured quite regularly, in draft #1.
Zoe was just devastated. She cried a bit. Then she just smiled, etcetera. (No commas.)
It’s lazy writing of course and it doesn’t fit with my executive decision about the voices, so it has to go and be replaced with the much more formal:
Zoe was simply devastated. She cried, a little. Then, she merely smiled, etcetera.
I have different thoughts about each of those words:
It’s a shame to always have to lose ‘bit’, because this is just simply Northern, for ‘little’.
“I’ll take a little soup.” “I’ll have a bit of soup.”
Yes, we really do speak like that up here, even now, in the 21st Century. I know that down South, you’re all, “Oh, daaahling, parse the soup, what?” but up here, it’s: “Oi. Git soup.” Words are expensive in some parts of Yorkshire, excluding Harrogate, of course. They’ll talk ’til t’cows come ‘ome, in ‘arrogate. Or if you want real dialect: They’ll call on, pronounced to rhyme with the name Sal, and meaning, ‘talk’, or – more correctly – gossip. ‘Talk’ being a fancy Southern word, like ‘little’.
I don’t know how interested in the rapidly diminishing Yorkshire dialect people actually are, suspecting it is rapidly diminishing for a reason, but if an old Yorkshire man (or woman) actually wants to refer to something or someone as ‘little’, they will use ‘nobbut’.
“She’s nobbut a bairn,” means, “She’s nothing but a child.”
“It’s nobbut a twig,” means, “It’s a little branch,” or, more likely still, “That thing you’re calling a branch, is nothing like a branch.” We’re not particularly famed for our diplomacy, as you probably know.
I’m more happy to wave goodbye to the word ‘just’, except in the context of something being fair and equitable, which is what it actually means. ‘A bit’ means the same as ‘a little’, but ‘just’ does not mean the same as ‘simply’, or ‘merely’, or ‘only’. They all, separately, mean something quite different and as a writer, I should say what I mean and mean what I say.