Plurk verb issue/question

Why does pinging to Plurk automatically append a "said: " to the beginning of each post that doesn't begin with "% [verb]"??? The standard "verb" for Plurk is "says" but Plurk unfortunately isn't smart enough to turn "said: " to "says." Thus, the "said: " ends up reducing the 140 characters available while a "says" does not.

Make sense? If I post a 140 character message to Plurk from Ping.fm and don't use something like "% is", Ping.fm will append a "said: " which reduces the available characters by 5. If Ping.fm were to instead append "says" or nothing at all (the "freestyle" Plurk option), all characters would be available.