Reader Joanne sent me an e-mail recently that thrilled me down to my bitchy little toes, because she hit on one of my biggest peeves in historical romance: the way many of the characters tend to sound like Americans in period drag. Americans with bad British accents in period drag.
To quote from her e-mail:
I have literally not read any historicals since I was a teenager (now mid-thirties so a big gap there). I immediately re-read a few Heyers, and then the two novels so far released by Elizabeth Hoyt and my first two Julia Quinns (Bridgerton ones).
They were all very enjoyable but every time I came across anachronisms in the dialogue (it’s not so bad if it happens in the narrative) it would suck me right out of my happy haze. They might as well have stuck in the words THIS IS NOT REAL; YOU ARE READING A WORK OF FICTION. It would have much the same effect.
Now, I am British, so it may be that there are very small things that sound glaringly American to me but perhaps sound so everyday to an American reader that they don’t particularly notice them.
My beefs:1. Julia Quinn’s characters constantly say “Right” (as in “ok”). I just can’t see English people in the early 19th Century saying that. English people today don’t say that.
2. Again Quinn: she uses very English words like “bloke” and “sodding” as though to add to the authenticity but to me, these are contemporary words and stand out like a sore thumb.
Ohhhh, lordy lord yes. I have to interrupt here to emphasize this point, because honestly, adding contemporary British slang (bad British slang, at that) to a historical does nothing for the verisimilitude of the book. In fact, it makes the book sound more jarring. Look, kids, we’re aiming for characters who sound like Jane Austen, not Nick Hornby, mmmkay? Just remember: throwing in the occasional “sodding bloke” does not a convincing historical make.
(Insert Oscar Wilde jokes here.)
3. I have to say, Elizabeth Hoyt was pretty much spot on for my money on her dialogue – but for one thing. Her characters constantly said “I guess” when, to me, an English person would in fact say “I suppose”.
I suspect that 95% of the buyers of these books are American so, if those readers are not bothered by these (admittedly minor) anachronisms, I suppose the authors will not be particularly concerned. But damn it, this bothered me when I read these books and I wanted to bitch about it!
By the way, I am not just having a go at American writers. I am sure there are lots of British writers who are guilty of these faults – it’s just I’ve not really read much of this genre in the last fifteen years but in the last four weeks I’ve read 6 or 7 pitch-perfect Heyers and then read four novels by contemporary Americans with these very minor faults.
To get to the point – what interests me is this:
(1) is this type of anachronistic dialogue bothering to anyone else out there or am I being way too picky?
(2) what other anachronisms bother people and
(3) most importantly given that I am just getting into this genre again after about 15 years – who are the novelists who really get this right?
Here are my answers to Joanna:
1. You’re not alone. Oh God no. I believe I’ve bitched before about how it drives me bugfuck when authors slip in Regency-era slang like “make micefeet of things,” only to turn around and use terms like “OK” or “That’s fine,” or construct sentences that use “get” as an auxiliary verb, often resulting in sentences that are an unholy chimera of Regency Miss and Valley Girl (e.g., “I’ve got to run now, or I won’t get to go to the ball, and then Mama will surely be beside herself”). It throws me out of the story, and it’s one of the reasons why I have to be in the right mood to read Julia Quinn. Mary Jo Putney used to get a pass from me, but after a while I had to stop reading her, too, because I couldn’t get past her dialogue. And I gave up on Patricia Ryan’s medievals entirely (hey, what happened to her, anyway?) when one of her characters used the term “pariah” centuries before the English traveled to the Indian subcontinent.
2. It peeves me when scientifically-inclined types in historicals talk about science in modern terms—I’ve caught characters talking about bacteria, oxygen, genes, electromagnetic waves and morphine long before these things were discovered or isolated and given names. Look, if you want to create a mad scientist type who’s years ahead of his or her time, that’s all well and good, but have them talk about the science in the terms of their day.
Anachronistic behavior and attitudes often annoy me as well, but that’s another rant for another day.
3. Laura Kinsale, in my opinion, gets the dialogue right—but she gets most things right. For My Lady’s Heart has dialogue in Middle English—how sexy is that? You may not care for her plots or the way she writes in general, but she does a fantastic job with the dialogue. And earlier Loretta Chase novels, before she became enamored with very. short. sentences, are a joy to read because she gets the cadences right as well. The Lion’s Daughter, Captives of the Night and Lord of Scoundrels are all cracking good reads, as are pretty much all her Regencies. Judith Ivory, a.k.a. Judy Cuevas, does a decent job much of the time, though she occasionally slips. These are just the names that immediately came to mind; I’ll post more as they occur to me.
So now we turn the questions over to the Bitchery: Do you in any way care about anachronistic language? If you do, what are the examples that especially burned your biscuit? (Note to authors: if you’ve ever, ever, ever used the word “cookies” to refer to biscuits in British-set historicals, shame on you—that makes the sodding blokes weep tears of sadness over their crumpets and cucumber sandwiches.) And most importantly: any authors to recommend Joanna?
The thing that gets me all eye twitching irritated is when the author puts in one or two Big Obvious Facts to show how she oh-so-thoroughly researched for her book—and the fact is mind-rapingly wrong. I read one where there was some reading of the new Austen novel two years before her first book was written. There’s a Lisa Kleypas in the Bowstreet Runners where he has an indoor, hot running water shower. I think it’s just there for them to have standing up in the shower sex.
Or the not wearing structured underpinnings of giant structured ball gowns? The heroine is no less spunky for being accurate, although she probably would look a lot less like a deflated taffeta balloon.
One of the absolute numero uno bitch-inducing things? Diamonds. Engagement rings that are blinding with their rainbow brilliance or that treasure of loose diamonds in a bag in the Middle Ages? Yeah. They couldn’t actually polish or cut them to properly bring out the brilliance until relatively recently. DeBeers is largely responsible for the phenomenon of diamond engagement rings, and the company wasn’t founded until 1870.
“Okay†is my pet-peeve in dialogue.
Oh, lordy lordy me, YES. I don’t read many historicals, so I can’t say that I’ve experienced the language thing all that often, but “okay” kills me every time because it is So Fucking Obvious!!!
Look, if your average Jane who has done exactly NO studying of any historical time period (aka, me) can spot that one instantly, YOU SHOULD HAVE GOT IT TOO.
Can I toss out another language thing that does piss me off regularly? Ancient [vampire, werewolf, wizard, immortal whateveryouwant] who can’t comprehend contractions, speak in a normal flowing cadence, or use modern slang. Okay (heh), so they’re OLD—so what? You know something? I spoke a helluva lot differently in the 80s than I do here in 2007. If I, a mere mortal, can manage to move with the times, why can’t this all-powerful whatever manage it? Ancient and powerful does not equal very intelligent, I suppose.
The only author who manages this without annoying me is Sherrilyn Kenyon with the goddess Artemis. She mangles modern slang and gets heartily mocked for it by the other characters.
Everyone else? Argh!!!
Total dittos, makes me bugnuts. The main reasons I don’t read much historical…errors in language, errors in customs, errors in costume. Kalen’s Lord of Sin did a great with the historical costume thing.
Of course, contemporaries are not immune. I’ve read several lately that attempt trendy slang that totally miss the mark. Hey, I have 3 teenagers (so entertaining). And in Sugar Daddy, Lisa Kleypas places her heroine in an uber trendy hair salon, and carefully discribes her wearing blah white caprees and a black tee…has Kleypas ever visited one of these places? The stylists LIVE for hair and clothes…comeon they work with designers & work fashion runways on vacation. And don’t even get me started about impossible sexual positions…again, do they try it before they write it? Sometimes I wonder if more of the authors are virgins that their heroines.
And don’t even get me started about impossible sexual positions
Oh God yes! My favorite one was where the hero was licking the heroine’s clit as he screwed her doggy-style. Um, excuse me, what? First of all, I need to meet this guy because holy hamana, that’s some serious humpty talent. Secondly…
… no, I can’t even think of a secondly. I want his phone number. Wow.
I was going to mention the “cookie” thing, but that’s covered. One other that had me howling with derision was the daughter of an Earl “working in her yard”. A yard, in England is a concrete space where you keep the dustbins (garbage cans) or beer barrels and empties (in a public house). The English “garden”—and yes, that’s a verb.
I was pretty steamed, by the way, when a copy editor stuck a “gotten” into one of my (contemporary) books after I’d seen the page proofs. We don’t say that, either. Sometimes it’s not the author’s fault. 🙁
Oh yes… anachronisms. I own several “Authors Guides to (Period X)” Medieval, Wild West, Regency… etc.
My favorite quote was from the Medieval Guide. “Why Stews are not something to eat, and Coffyns were not something you buried people in.”
To those not already in the know, Stews were brothels and Coffyns were pastry shells. These books are seriously valuable for writers. 🙂
“It is the big errors that get me, like in the showtime show The Tudors when they have Margret Tudor marry the king of Portugal then smother him and marry Charles Brandon!!!”
FWIW, if you look at the descriptions of the characters on the series’ website (http://www.sho.com/site/tudors/characters.do) you’ll see that they got Margaret’s bio correct. So I think they got this wrong on purpose. I do understand a lot of the inaccurate choices they’ve made (uh, the men’s hairstyles for one thing, but I get that they’re trying to make them more attractive to the modern viewer), but why they gave a warped version of Mary’s history to Margaret is beyond me.
There are plenty of anachronisms on this show, probably a lot more than I’ve noticed since I’m not that familiar with the era, but it’s been entertaining enough so far that I don’t rreally care about the errors!
Kalen’s Lord of Sin did a great with the historical costume thing.
I should hope so! Kalen is our costume expert on the Beau Monde list. 🙂 Her workshops are perfect for making you realize your heroine is running around with half of her underwear missing.
Sandra – I just finished Castle of the Wolf, and yes I picked up the ‘problems’, and I laughed at them too . . . Especially one of the “holy cow!†‘s. It was perfect!
Tee-hee. I’m glad you enjoyed it, Anne! And think I know which cow you mean. *g* Speaking of which, I’ll soon upload a picture of the day-time face of the little Queen of Spades on my website.
I mean we went from holy cow to namby-pamby noddy-pole
I had lots of fun with these and spent hours studying my Regency Thesaurus in search of the perfect swear word.
Lili sent us the following link to a blogger who takes on a “I didn’t do any research” disclaimer by author Margaret Drabble.
It’s not anachronism, except maybe for the part where it’s somewhat anachronistic for an author to say, “Yeah, I couldn’t be arsed to actually look up the world I set my book in.” Geez.
LOL!
Yeppers on the position thing. I’ve read books where no matter how many times I read the scene, I could not for the LIFE of me figure out how they were doing what they were doing.
I mean, I can see some kind of research going on, at least as far as body dynamics go.
“Hun, can you come here for a minute? I’m working on a bedroom scene in my book and I need some help figuring out if this will work.”
“No, you can keep your clothes on, I just want to see if A can meet B, C can touch D and E & F work.”
I’m with you on that—Americans use the term paddock, particularly in the horse circles, and I’ve never heard of “ripple iron”, although I used to have an outbuilding with a corrugated roof. 🙂 I think your editors/publishers could use an actual rural American’s help editing. A field is for growing grain, a paddock is for animals. At least in Tennessee. 🙂
I have to say I can be pretty forgiving of out of place dialogue and (occasionally) historical innacuracies—if I’m enjoying the story and the innacuracies serve a purpose (such as to shorten an otherwise overlong info-dump), but if I am not enjoying the book anyway….Kiss of Death.
Beautiful Boyfriend will not watch movies with me that feature Greeks, Romans, Celts, Vikings, and, well, too many to mention. I realize that I am truly nerdy when it comes to these things, but sometimes it is just too difficult to suspend belief.
For the love of Loki, Vikings did not have horns on their helmets!
Kalen’s Lord of Sin did a great with the historical costume thing.
:::blush::: Thanks. I do try, and historical costuming is my passion. Of course now I’m terrified that I used some horrible American word my book . . . I did have “ego†in my first draft. Luckily I caught it. Sometimes a word is just soooooooooo a part of your vocab that you don’t think twice about it. And then there’s the simple fact that many/most of us are not British (though a lot of us are screaming Anglophiles, LOL!). At my book launch I caught the two guys from London and the guy from Edinburgh standing next to the book shelf skimming over the titles in disbelief. They just couldn’t understand why anyone who need, let alone what, and entire shelf of books devoted to London alone. LOL!
I think the word use that bugged me the most recently was a book (Regency set) where the heroine said “thanks†every other page. It bothered me so much I looked it up. It’s period according to the OED and usage in books written during the period, but it still strikes me ass off somehow. *shrug* Maybe it just doesn’t seem polite enough?
p.s.
I have no freaken idea what “ripple iron†is, but I’m 100% clear on what a corrugated iron roof is.
Even Shakespeare’s plays had anachronisms, for example, in Julius Caesar, Act 2 Scene 1, a clock strikes. IMO, that’s pretty good company to be in. Of course, there’s debate as to whether his inclusion of anachronisms was intentional. BTW, isn’t Julia Quinn a professor of Shakespeare at Fordham University?
emdee, that would be Eloisa James. Julia Quinn’s background is med school, as far as I remember.
Ugh!
Lauren Willig really ticked me off.
Because, argh, Sir Percival Blakeney, Baronet, sprinkled his dialogue with such marvelous slang as it was. Where, oh where, were the expressions of “La!”, “Odd’s Fish!” and “Sink Me!” hiding?
Instead we were treated to argh, urgh, and ugh.
And by the time I read the Edmund Kean thing, I was already wall-banging. WHAT a disappointment! I’m sorry, but she could have done so much better.
Place me in the “anachronisms bother me when they bother me” camp. For obvious reasons, authors can’t have characters speaking actual Middle English because only a few people would understand what they were saying and no one would read the books.
I do appreciate an author who adds an auth’rs note at the end, saying “this wasn’t invented at this time, but I fudged the dates a little for story reasons.” I can forgive that.
I just recently read a romance where the character answered, “Yeah,” instead of “Yes.” Even if the novel was a contemporary, that would drive me batshit. The fact that it was a historical romance made it even worse for me. I also have to agree that using “OK” in a historical is awful.
I know no author can spend weeks or months reseaching everything, but a local library could probably get most of the information pretty quickly. I doubt any librarian would mind getting asked such a question. I know I’d love it.
In general, a little anachronism here or there doesn’t bother me one bit. Everyone makes mistakes, and everyone has high points and low points.
The worst anachronisms in my mind—the ones that really chafe—are the ones that have become “period” by dint of collective delusion on the part of romance authors.
For instance: “Scandal broth.” Misused by Georgette Heyer, and thus misused by everyone thereafter. You cannot “land” in scandal-broth. It is not something that’s served up like soup. Scandal-broth is another word for tea. It is not a scandalous broth. It is something you sip while gossiping about scandal. Look it up in the Devil’s Dictionary or the OED.
Beyond that, I have to say that the biggest collective delusion that romance authors have out there regards legal aspects of the time. The law was actually substantially more developed than romance authors are willing to credit.
For instance: women in the Regency era could own separate property (in equity, although not at law). And you couldn’t leave property either in restraint or coercion of marriage. So you couldn’t leave your widow a huge fortune with the condition that she never marry; you couldn’t require a 25-year old girl to obtain the consent of some other person before she married; and you most certainly couldn’t leave your property to X on the condition that he marry Y.
The vast majority of wills in romance novels which lead to marriages of convenience would never have been upheld by chancery.
I’m sick of reading about historical heroines who agonize over the state of their Relationship with the hero. I will accept the phrase “romantic relationship” but otherwise, it sounds too modern. The use of the word “relationship” without a modifier to mean a romantic relationship is fairly recent.
Like “relationship” there are many words which were once used with a modifier to describe a range interactions that now have only one meaning. Try saying “intercourse” in front of a room full of fourth graders, and you’ll see what I mean.
It drives me crazy when the author has learned only a few period words and throws them in everywhere to show historical accuracy. I read one Georgette Heyer in which characters talked about “the ton” every other paragraph. “The ton will be shocked.” “What will the ton think?” “She is admired by the ton.” Etc. Okay, Georgette, we get it already.
Does Jane Austen ever use the term? I think not.
(I’m still going to read Georgette’s other novels.”
First off, there is not really such a thing as a “British accent.” We have English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, cockney, middle class, northern, London, southern etc etc to choose from, but most of us Brits will look at you funny when you say we have ‘British’ accents.
Your accent in the UK gives away your class, geographical location and instantly pegs you in the microscopic world of the English class system. That’s why word choices, dialogue and even names make such a difference when you choose to write a historical set in Britain.
Note, many of the best historical authors, Jo Beverly, Mary Balogh, Julia Ross are originally from the UK, that’s why they get it right. It’s instinctive and almost impossible to explain. But I must add that I take my hat off to some of the American authors as well for getting it mainly right. (I also write contemporaries set in the U.S. and I have to get someone here to go through them and de-Brit me!)
I know that most of the people buying the books are here in the U.S. and I’m always told that it doesn’t matter if some things are wrong, but for me, being a Brit, it just jars me out of the story.
sorry
Wow, this discussion is telling me a lot about how I process what I read. Unless there is a glaring gramatical error (there was one book I had to stop reading because it pulled me out of the story), I rarely even completely register the words. The best way I can describe what happens for me with a romance novel (or other good fiction) is that it plays a bit like a movie in my head. I see the characters and hear them. The story envelopes me.
I was reading The Mother Tongue recently (for the tenth time), and I ran across some info that I LOVED as a (petty) American writing British historicals. Apparently there are quite a few saying and words that WERE used in England, then fell out of use there, and became reviled as Americanisms!
Words like sick (as in unwell), fall (for autumn), mad (for angry) trash, hog. . . And, oh my gosh, look at this. . . “and the expression I guess.”
And, sorry girls. . . “The best noted, perhaps, is gotten, which to most Britons is the quaintest of Americanisms. It is now so unused in Britain that many Btitons have to have the distinction between got and gotten explained to them. . . even though they make exactly the same distinction with forgot and forgotten. gotten also survives in England in one or two phrases, notable ‘ill-gotten gains’.”
Your accent in the UK gives away your class, geographical location and instantly pegs you in the microscopic world of the English class system. That’s why word choices, dialogue and even names make such a difference when you choose to write a historical set in Britain.
So does your accent and word choice here in the States to a well-trained ear. The thing that really blows me away is when people can’t tell what country an English speaking foreigner is from (like Aussies and Scotsmen sound alike)! And this is not just an American thing, I’ve been told by numerous Brits that Americans and Aussies sound exactly the same to them. Which slays me.
When I was in grad school I hung out in a bar in San Francisco (The Fiddler’s Green) which is pretty much wall-to-wall Irish men on a busy night. I loved when someone new arrived and was made to talk until where he was from could be discerned. LOL!
Have to admit that I love listening to BBC productions where a character is supposed to be an American. They get it wrong quite a bit. On the other hand Hugh Laurie as House gets it right to my ear.
There was one book by Anne Stuart (The Widow?) where the hero was supposed to be an Australian journalist. He might as well have gone to Northwestern from the dialogue. She also had him do something odd like use the word “mither” for mother.
Maybe anyone from Australia can let me know if this is common. It sounds more to me like the Childe ballads: Oh, mither, come make by bed, make it soft and narrow, etc.
Great, inexhaustible topic.
Not only do modern English accents reveal class as well as region, but they have changed over the decades and centuries. For instance, the w/v exchange of Dickens’ characters was in use in the Regency, but if I read that in a Regency-set it would immediately strike me as anachronistic. Similarly some slang is very old—I could have sworn that calling someone ‘old chap’ was late Victorian/Edwardian, but no, Pierre Egan uses it during the Regency—again, that screams anachronism to me.
I think, tho, that all those Regency characters saying things like ‘jolly good’ and ‘spiffing,’ not to mention dowagers calling girls ‘gels,’ represent mere laziness on the part of writers—if I read it in X’s book then I can put it in mine, and so on. So we have this idealized Regencyland where if it sounds cute and British it’s ok.
And I’m pretty sure that the aristocracy didn’t speak standard posh/BBC English, altho I have no way of proving otherwise. Class and status would be revealed by vocabulary and expression, not by vowel sounds. Just a guess, but I like my aristos to be able to understand their tenants.
Janet
Just realized that “gotten” was given here as contemp example, not historical. My bad. I was just so excited when I saw it in the book moments after reading the post. *g*
I’m pretty generous when it comes to anachronisms, so if *I* notice it in a book. . . you know it’s bad. The word “okay” for example. I just can’t fathom how every person along the line-author, first reader, editor, copyeditor-could miss that one.
“So does your accent and word choice here in the States to a well-trained ear. The thing that really blows me away is when people can’t tell what country an English speaking foreigner is from (like Aussies and Scotsmen sound alike)!”
Its true – when I lived in Scotland for a wee while as a kid, they thought I was a “Yank” it annoyed me no end!
I love listening for accents: some are easy – Canadians with that funny ‘oo’ in about – and New Yorkers and generic ‘southerners’. That’s about it for the USA; in the UK I can tell Glaswegians, Edinburgh (posh!), Yorkshire. Here, Queenslanders/bushies tend to speak with their teeth together (a combination of keeping the flies out and natural reserve). A certain exclusive girl’s school has a ‘lisp’.
Aparrently some people can’t actually -hear- marginally different sounds if they don’t grow up listening to them. Maybe people who can’t tell the difference haven’t been exposed to the different sound and really can’t hear it.
which is completely off topic…..
This post is apposite for me because I just received a comment on a blog that said, ‘you write well for an American’. Actually, I’m Australian, so I really don’t know what that means!
Kinsale is a genius. I love Loretta Chase and I always think Mary Balogh does a wonderful job of remaining true to the language and mores of the time, without her writing seeming fusty and old-fashioned.
I used to throw books at the wall when I came across too many Americanisms. However, I have come to enjoy the JQ style romance as a bit of fun, a fairytale that isn’t meant to be historically accurate, but set in some alternate, fictional Regency universe. When I slip into that mode, anachronisms don’t bother me too much. It’s not the kind of book I aspire to write, it’s almost like a different subgenre and I can suspend disbelief and go along for the ride. I suppose in those books, I’m reading for the romance, rather than the historical detail.
Eek. I’ve wandered into a clutch of vampires. Most of youse guys have been around an awfully long time!
(Amy E, everybody knows a bud can be licked during a backdoor hump if the hero is a shapeshifter who is not a wolf but, rather, a giraffe. Get hip.)
Emma G, I did notice that the bio on the site was correct and I do still watch the show and find it entertaining. For the most part anachronisms on that show do not bother me as I think the acting is good and it is otherwise a good show. That stuff didnt bother me at all but it was just the fact that they chose to disregard such a huge set of facts I found quite odd. It was like the writers said “Well you know this Tudory stuff was really interesting but I think it would be better if we turned Princess Margaret into an Anna Nicole type with the whole geezer marrying thing… yeah thats brilliant!” WTF??
To change topic, as to the British thing, I think it is hard to understand accents if you are not exposed to them. I can tell where a British person is from by their accent but I lived there for a few years. For people who have only ever been exposed to accents on TV and movies it is hard. From what I understand, it wasn’t until relatively recently that the BBC started depicting more regional and lower class accents on their programs as opposed to more upper class ones. So, as this is the only time many Americans are exposed to British accents it is the “pip-pip and tally ho tea and crumpets” kind. And for the record it does go both ways. It always amazed me that so many people expected me to either talk like a cowboy or a valley girl. So to most English people Americans will have the image of yanks and most Americans will think everyone sounds like the queen.
I’ve been told by numerous Brits that Americans and Aussies sound exactly the same to them. Which slays me.
I never got that when I was living in England. I was often told that *Canadians* and Americans sound the same to them, which makes sense, because the difference is pretty subtle. Actually, at least 50% of the time Brits guessed that I was Canadian, though one confessed to me that if a person didn’t have a strong regional American accent, like an extreme Southern or New York accent, he guessed Canadian, because Americans never mind if you think they’re Canadian, but Canadians get huffy if you assume they’re Yanks!
I can distinguish regional British accents, though often it’s almost subconscious—I’ll be thinking how pleasant and familiar someone on BBC America sounds and then realize they’re from the part of England where I lived in 1997-98 (Bristol, though most of the people I knew had the general SW England accent rather than the old Bristol one where “America” sounds almost like “a miracle”) or sound like someone else I used to know.
As an American writing British historical settings, I do my best to get the vocabulary right, but I don’t attempt regional or class-related dialects beyond occasional word choice variations. For one thing, I write military settings, so I typically have characters from more than one place/class, and if I researched each individual accent for long enough to be confident I was getting it right, I’d never finish a book. Also, *no one* speaks English exactly as it’s spelled, so I don’t like using misspellings to indicate dialect. Besides, they slow the reader down, and I never want to do that—if they slow down, they might stop!
I know I’m straying a bit off topic, but wanted to jump in anyhoo.
Writing historicals can be a total booger. To do them well involves tons of research. (Not saying my book was great, but boy did I research. Inheritance laws, political happenings surrounding the time period, blah blah blah.)
And, when you look for word origin, you can mire yourself looking for each and every instance of misuse. It therefore doesn’t suprise me when minor oopsies slip past. (Okay, not the use of “Okay”, but you get my drift.)
Um, so what was my post about?
OH, Yeah. I wanted to share a link about dyes in the 14th and 15th centuries. The color of clothing is another point of contention with many historical fans. I found this site very helpful.
http://www.historicenterprises.com/colors.php
Yes, my dears. Most often the secret ingredient to make dyes work was…Urine.
It provided the amonia necessary to get the most color from the plants.
Sigh. (Having horrid flashbacks of the making of Peach Pernot
in the Medicine Man.)
Jewell, I hate to tell you this, but urine wasn’t only used for dyes. *g* It also played a huge role in medicine. Actually, Paulini’s “Heylsame Drecksapotheke” proposed to use even yuckier stuff than urine for medical purposes. And up till the early 20th century the stuff some apothecaries sold as “white gentian” was actually dried doggy poop. (Research can be so much fun!)
“I love listening for accents: some are easy – Canadians with that funny ‘oo’ in about”
Hmm, well the only Canadians who say “aboot” are the ones from the East Coast, and frankly, that’s a VERY SMALL percentage of the population.
Read a hockey romance book by an American author and I couldn’t bring myself to finish it because it was just TOO PAINFUL. Her hero was a Canadian born in Edmonton, Alberta and she kept making a point of him saying “aboot.” NOOOO! So very, very wrong!
The other pet peeve: authors who use French and don’t understand the importance of gender in the French language. And, even worse, those who don’t understand the importance of accents (grave, acute, circumflex), and drop them entirely. What? You couldn’t invest $20 in a good Collins French-English dictionary?
Okay, that’s it. I’m calm again.
I don’t care too much about having absolutely authentic dialogue. I mean, it’s a book! It’s fictional! Now, there are some lazy writers who don’t even try to come close to making the dialogue sound anything but 20th century American…and that does chap my hide.
But saying “Okay” 10 years too early or using “pariah” before the English even went to India? Um, not a big deal.
I hear many times this is why some people won’t read historicals. It isn’t authentic enough for them. Geez. Can I point to any number of romantic suspense stories that mess up how the FBI works or don’t know an uzi from a .45?
I read a blog by one writer who claimed that she didn’t need to research about the FBI or the CIA because you can learn all that stuff from watching TV! AAHHHH!!!!!!!!
Fiction is fiction. I give MORE leeway to historical fiction because no one speaks like that anymore and trying to stay period-perfect is pretty darn difficult. I give less leeway to contemporary books who have any number of people to speak with to get the details and the dialogue right.
I just had to comment on this:
“To those not already in the know, Stews were brothels and Coffyns were pastry shells. These books are seriously valuable for writers.”
It was nice that you bought all these books about each historical period, but if you wrote a book and used the word ‘stew’ for brothel most of your readership would be highly confused.
I believe in some amount of authenticity…but to go overboard and nitpick over everything will make your book inaccessible to the general reading public. IMHO.
re got and gotten: When I started writing Regency-set, I couldn’t figure out how I knew to use the older British form. But there it was in my ear, in my mind.
Took me a while to realize that there was a layer of British English that I had learned unconsciously and very young, from Pooh and Piglet, Alice and Mary Poppins. Not everything, of course (and I shudder to think of what I do get wrong and don’t even notice!) I did pick up a few of the basics back then, thank goodness.
There’s been a little discussion going on about people hearing different English speaker accents as being more or less similar to each other. Actually quite a few years ago now, back when I was doing my degree in linguistics (or maybe a bit before that), there was some social-linguistic research done on this very topic.
According to the reseach in general English speakers hear those furthest from them geographically as being most similar to each other and most different from the home dialect. So those from England/Scotland/Wales tend to hear North American speakers and Australian speaker as having a really similar accent. North American tend to hear Australians and those from the British Isles as sounding the most similar to each other. And Australians tend to hear North Americans and British Isles speakers as being the most similar. Of course, this is a broad generalization. There will always be sensitive listeners out there. Isn’t it interesting, though, how perception can be so different.
In a country as large as the U.S., we have some of this phenomenon as well. People will hear one homogeneous southern accent if they are from the North, etc etc. Me, I can hear the difference between East and West Texas, a true Okie, folks from Arkansas but I can tell if you are from the Bronx or Brooklyn or New Jersey. And I know Canadians sound a little different to lots of Americans, but to me they sound a lot like the northern top of the mid-west. So there you go: geographical deafness.
With reference to the preceding comment, while there may be an element of truth to it, I have yet to hear of an Australian (or New Zealander) confusing an American accent (any of them) with a British accent (any of those). We can certainly confuse northern American and Canadian.
I have, however, had one English twit accuse me of being South African (this is when I’d been in London a few years, and my kiwi accent had been watered down slightly), and plenty of Americans thinking I was “British”. Of course, it is extremely common for my accent to be confused with an Aussie one – vexing as it is, the differences are fairly subtle, with a few exceptions (for example, we kiwis say UK-style “dahnce” rather than the US-style “dance”).
Regarding anachronisms, I have somewhat of a tolerance – reading books with dialogue exclusively in the style of the day would be fairly wearisome. But yes, “OK” will drop me right out of my WSOD, as will my especial pet-hate with regard to fiction set in England, “Oh my!” Oh my what? Gah!
Then you get people like Connie Willis, who tried really hard with her books set in Oxford… and who talked about “mufflers” on just about every page. I had to look it up on m-w.com to figure out she was talking about scarves. I don’t mind the occasional slip-up, but the word seemed to pop up every five pages, on average. It was incredibly distracting.
“knew69” – erm.