Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

For My Lady’s Heart has dialogue in Middle English—how sexy is that?

Can you give an example, Candy? For, shame on me, I haven’t yet read any of Kinsale’s books (I totally blame this on living on the other side of the world and starting out very late in romance) and when I used the Search Inside function, I found medievalized (modern) English, but no real Middle English.

I have been blamed for historically incorrect language in Castle of the Wolf: one of my characters says “geez” twice; another “holy cow” twice, but in both cases I used the anachronism deliberately because imo, it suited both the character and the situation (and a correct German expression like Himmelherrgottsakrament! wouldn’t have had the same punch as geez). But so far, nobody commented on the fact that my heroine finds a Terry Pratchett book in the library of her castle or that at one point she refers to a short story by Tolkien. *g*

As a reader I’m not so much bothered by historically incorrect language (what about historicals set in Anglo-Saxon times??? Does anybody want to read Old English dialogue?), but by factual mistakes or by overdone explanations.

Oops. Sorry this became so long ...

I can’t think of an example of an author getting this right or wrong, but if you are going to use the second person informal, use it when it makes sense to use an informal, and decline it correctly.  (Is decline the right word for English?  I learned all the grammatical terms I know for changing noun forms in Latin class.)

I can’t recall the author or the title, but I innocently opened an alleged Regency with a blonde heroine (the cover had a decided brunette in a gown nicked from Scarlett O’Hara, but that’s another issue,) to have the first sentance describe some Regency Ladies’ Book Club wherein they’re reading a book by “Miss Jane Austen” in a specific year when Austen would have only published novels anonymously and the novel in question, I think, didn’t get published until two or three years later. The Austen nerd inside me cried a little and I shut the book and never looked back.
“Okay” is my pet-peeve in dialogue. I was watching One Night with the King; and hearing some ancient characters ask people if they’re “okay” (more than once,) made me cringe.

(verification: period25)

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Can you give an example, Candy?>>

I gotta wonder how anybody not specifically schooled in the language can translate Middle English.  In college I had to memorize the prelude to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English (or whatever period of English it was written it), and it’s not the type of stuff we modern folk can translate very easily:

Whan that Aprille with his shoores soote,
The drought of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every vein in swich liquor,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour….

Say what?!?!?!  I can make out a few words, of course, but it’s not like I can read that stuff for comprehension.

I don’t like the very obvious anachronisms—the really modern ones—but a lot of them are going to pass right by me due to my own ignorance.  Not only am I not English, and therefore don’t know what is typical English slang/vernacular, but I also don’t know when words came into common usage. 

One author I enjoy who weaves the anachronisms throughout her story—but has a valid reason for doing so—is Diana Gabaldon.  There’s a scene in Outlander when Claire calls Jamie a “fucking sadist” and he has to ask for a translation.  Such instances crop up througout the series, and I always find them to be very entertaining.

That Austen one happens all the time and it drives me nuts! The authors always seem so fatuous.

The original commentor did pick a particularly poor choice to restart reading historicals though. There are many, many less obnoxiously anachronistic authors. Try some Jo Beverly, you can count on her to get it right.

First, if you’re going to talk about anachronism pinatas, I’m pretty sure you should put the tilda over the n!

Seriously, I’ve just finishing a Lauren Willig novel, and it is so damned good! I’m reading it right after a Mary Jo Putney as I seem to be on a historical jag right now. Willig’s dialog is so very very right. I’m just finishing THE BLACK TULIP, but I just check THE PINK CARNATION out, so its next in my tbr pile.

I’m not British, but I’ve spent way too much time overseas. I highly recommend Lauren Willig.

SWAK,
Lucinda

We just had a long and fascinating discussion about anachronisms, in dialogue and more, over at Lust Bites, if anyone wants to pop over and check that out.  :-)

Nifty, my students didn’t even understand Chaucer when I gave them the modern English translation to read. I had to explain to them all the naughty bits—and even then there were people who just didn’t get it (like that a guy who grabs a girl between the legs and says stuff like, “If you don’t love me, I shall die” doesn’t necessarily have everlasting love and marriage on his mind…) (fitting verification: wife99)

I have to say that, usually, anachronistic dialogue doesn’t bother me. I can totally accept that these characters live in a fantasy past where they bathe regularly and shave their legs (if they don’t, I pretend they do), so I also accept fantasy-past dialogue. Maybe it’s b/c I read romance novels with the same part of my brain that I use watch Buffy and love Pirates of the Caribbean, etc. The anachronisms are actually part of the charm.

What bothers me more is when the author appears or wants to appear to be really in touch with the period, but makes really obvious historical (or literary) mistakes…which leads me to Lauren Willig.

Maybe it’s just b/c it’s my field, but when Willig has characters talking about Edmund Kean’s acting a decade before he took the stage, or mentally comparing themselves to Keats in a year when Keats was all of 10 years old, my teeth start grinding together and it kills my enjoyment of the book. I’ll keep reading, but I’ll sneer the whole time.

So. Yeah. Anachronistic dialogue? Great! Bring it on! Characters enjoying Frankenstein in 1815? I mentally throw things at you in disgust and wonder if you (the author) is one of my chronology-challenged students.

Patricia Ryan has been writing her “Gilded Age” mysteries as P.B. Ryan and now erotica as Louisa Burton.

And by “you (the author) is…” I of course mean, “you (the author) are…”

Some English teacher I am.

Mine isn’t language, it’s things.  One author describing the huge one carat sapphire the heroine was wearing (erm, that’s the size of a pea).  Or another describing the naughty clothes that harem girls wore—- straight out of a Theda Bara movie and so wrong I was rolling my eyes.

Clearly wrong language does jar me, but more so is not knowing about the time and place of the book.  I know just enough junky trivia to get pissed because someone describes a fabric that hasn’t been woven yet or a dance that was created in Hollywood, not that country.

OK, and as gross as it sounds, I know folks didn’t bathe that often, so nightly baths by the fire may make me the reader feel better, but, well, I know they’re there to make me feel better :)  About two dirty people getting down and, ah, dirty.

“Whan that Aprille with his shoores soote,
The drought of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every vein in swich liquor,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour….”

A quick and dirty translation is that March was dry April’s showers are soothing and the flowers appreciate the rain.

Actually, not understanding how people in other parts of the world speak in the modern day bothers me more than anachronistic language.

The cringing Indian who calls every European memsahib; the Briton who uses words like tally-ho, pip-pip and toodle-pip (in 2007!); the American called Hiram who’s right excited, ma’am, to be around so many purdy fillies; the Australian who talks like Crocodile Dundee; the Canadian who puts “eh” at the end of every sentence (and isn’t even from Ontario!!); it’s all very distracting.

spamblock: normal69?

Yes, there are some words or phrases that pull me out of a Regency.
Off the top of my head ‘block’ as a measurement of distance - it’s not British English. ‘Intersection’ which I read as crossroads, though I’m not sure that’s right. Pupils ‘graduating’ from school - Quinn talks about graduating from Eton. You graduate from university in the UK.
‘Pants’ meaning trousers.

I probably wouldn’t be informed enough about the period to notice most anachronisms, but blatant Americanisms trip me up.

And I’m sure it happens the other way round. Was it John Creasey who had to stop writing westerns because he confused buzzards and coyotes and readers never quite forgave him the flying coyotes?

Language problems don’t bother me nearly as much as authors who Make Shit Up or don’t bother to fact check or are just plain lazy with things like spelling, place names, et cetera.

Movies are the same. In 300, I could not have cared less that all the Spartans and most of the Persians had vague Scots/Brit accents. It was consistent; whatever. In BEOWULF AND GRENDEL, on the other hand, everyone has a different accent and manner of speaking and it means NOTHING. Sometimes the Irish guy is from supposed to be Irish, but another Irish guy is supposed to be a Viking. Beowulf was the ONLY Scotsman. There was a Canadian witch. Ugh, urgh, achk. And they wore Uggs.

In Nora Roberts’s ANGEL FALLS (or whatever it’s called; the one with Heather Locklear on Lifetime), she repeatedly spells Newbury St. in Boston as “Newberry St.” She never once spells it correctly. Now THAT’S the kind of thing that makes me throw books.

Marianne, it does happen both ways. My favourite (although it wasn’t a romance) was a British writer who had his hero drive from Calgary to Banff - and stop for the night halfway on because it was too long to drive.

It’s about 70 minutes by car.

Not to say that he had spring beginning in March, and something like six feet of snow at Christmas!!!

Actually, there’s a post right now on the hockey LJ group about one of Nora Roberts’s books, “Loyalty in Death”, where she calls one of the wingers an “offensive guard” and one of the defencemen a “defensive lineman”. She also refers to the “upper deck” of Madison Square Garden (um, no!), has an occurrence happening in the “first period” at 8:43 (not completely impossible if there was an event at MSG earlier, but still about an hour or two too early) and a guy with a minor injury to the face is “carried off” (what hockey player would be carried off for a minor facial injury!!) and taken to the ER!!

The anachronisms are glaring!

Oooohhhhh this is such a bugbear with me as well!  I’m also a Brit who cringes inwardly at every Americanism in historical romances.  I’ve just finished one book where the author uses “quit” as in “will you quit doing that?” rather than use “stop”. It hauled me right out of the period with a jolt.  Another author uses the word “easy” when her hero comforts the heroine.  I have never heard a modern British man use “easy” in that particular context, so is it likely to have been used 150-200 years ago?

I would agree that Loretta Chase comes the closest in being able to imitate the flow of spoken English.  This was especially true in “Mr Impossible”, despite the use of short sentences.  Liz Carlyle also makes a fair attempt, although I think she has used the term “block” to mark distance instead of yards.

How do you feel about the use of various British dialects in historical fiction?  Obviously no-one can come close to the lovely recreated (or is that unreadable) Yorkshire accents in “Wuthering Heights”, but is it actually worth using them, or should they be avoided at all costs?  I must say I’ve read some laughable Scottish accents, cockney accents and west country accents in some of the historicals I’ve read.

Anachronisms don’t bother me… except when they do.  I mean, if I’m really enjoying the book—love the characters, ripping good plot, etc—then I barely notice the anachronisms (or they become part of the charm, as someone said above).

But.  BUT.  When there’s something blatantly out of place right on the first page, or if it’s a book I’m reading with lukewarm enthusiasm, they can throw me enough to put the book away unread. 

Most memorable one: someone in a medieval story referring to a person as ‘sadistic’, several hundred years before the Marquis was even a gleam in his papa’s eye.

These things bug me when I catch them,but I will admitI usually miss the “Americanisms” in european historicals. I love Emma Holly, but she has some glaring “Brittishisms” in some of her earlier contemporary novels set in the US, such as calling sneakers “trainers” and elevators “lifts.”  Those annoy the hell out of me, but I will say she has done much better with her more recent books.

I just read a sentence that read that Something had been done “for sure.”  In a book set in England in 1788.  Haven’t checked the etymology of sure, but that seems (to me) like a very modern usage.  Jolted me out of the story.

It’s a little hard to be sure about anachronisms with books like Loyalty in Death that are set in the future, though. Hockey could be a very different game in 2053, just like a number of games are different now than they were in the 1950s. Historical and contemporary anachronisms are easier to agree on, at least.

Oh yes, drives me nuts.  Also drives me nuts when colors are anachronistic.  It’s not as if people don’t have access to period information in the form of fashion books from at least the regency forward.  Aniline dyes weren’t invented until the mid 19th Century and the first color was mauve. Also black would have been very expensive to get right in Medieval times because of the available dyes, it would soon wear to rusty brown.

What Dara said. It doesn’t bother me, except when it does. I can deal with a few anachronisms in a book I’m enjoying, but if it’s borderline already the language will start to grate on me. Who is it whose heroes are always talking about a bloody damn this and that?

(and on the hockey thing… I got two chapters into a Rachel Gibson once where the hero was reminiscing about a particular game in which he incurred a three-minute penalty. I gave the book up for other reasons, but I thought it was a Sign.)

There are many British-isms in early Emma Holly erotica because they were published under Virgin’s Black Lace imprint.  Virgin is a British publisher.  Emma Holly is actually American, and now publishes with Berkley - an American publisher.  So that’s why you don’t see British-isms in her more recent work.

Sandra - I just finished Castle of the Wolf, and yes I picked up the ‘problems’, and I laughed at them too (which I assume from your post was your intent). Especially one of the “holy cow!” ‘s. It was perfect!

For some reason, the tone of your book, the attitudes of the people let me ignore that it wasn’t in period and just enjoy it.  I mean we went from holy cow to namby-pamby noddy-pole, what’s not to smile at :)

As for the topic, maybe it’s just because I have to be on the look out myself when I’m writing (I’m a NZ’er, so there’s Britishisms as well as Kiwi ones slipping in), but I often notice them now.

Biggest bug for me recently - Leslie LaFoy’s Duke’s Proposal. It says 1891 on the prologue and “one shoe was a good five to seven centimeters taller than the other”. ???? It didn’t think the UK came close to converting to metric until the 70’s/80’s?

PS forgot to say, I forgave her and liked The Duke’s proposal anyway.

This is why I write fantasy novels. Every now and again I get into a throwdown with someone who says, “Your characters said ‘okay’ but it’s a medieval setting!” And I reply that:

1. It’s not Earth, so they’re not even speaking any sort of English.

2. Even if it was medieval Earth England, the whole freaking book is written in not-Middle-English. If I can use the several thousand words the Shakespeare coined, I can jolly well use a word that’s a 170 freaking years old. (If someone wants to ding “okay” for an Americanism, that’s one thing. But to ding it for a modernism...get a calendar, honey.)

I knew a woman who was annoyed that Tolkien had Sam growing potatoes in the Shire. Fine, even allowing as how the Shire is supposed to be analog-England, it wasn’t bloody pre-Renaissance England! Potatoes were widespread by the 19th century—Irish Potato Blight, hello?

Ahem, sorry…this is a peeve of mine. People carry a lot of weird baggage with them to books, and then blame the writer.

I feel very sorry for writers of historicals, because no matter how hard they research, there will always be someone unhappy with some decision or mistake they made. If a fantasy writer who only has to make the worldbuilding consistent and logical is subject to hounding, how much worse is it for folks who are playing in the realm of historical reality?

I rarely am bothered by anachronistic language, so long as it is consistent. Candy’s “unholy chimera of Regency Miss and Valley Girl” bothers me, too (plus, the image makes me snort water out my nose).

I get annoyed by historical mistakes and large cultural errors. And physics errors, such as people carrying large gold bricks.

Honestly?  I picked up Colleen Gleason’s The Rest Falls Away based on the positive review it got here (B+), and the writing drove me batshit, most particularly for its anachronistic feel.  The book honestly read like a Buffy historical fanfic that Gleason filed the serial numbers off of to make a commercial series out of it; I mean, I seem to recall Victoria calling Maximilian “Sir Stakes-a-Lot” at one point.  If I have that one wrong, it’s still a good sampler of things that bugged me from the dialogue.

I had other issues with the book, too, but the tone felt so very much not-Regency to me, it kept giving the entire thing a flimsy feel.

Sometimes getting your tone right is a bad idea, of course; try reading E.R. Eddison.  (He’s great, but only if you can navigate what the hell he’s saying.)  But there are ways to strike a balance between a truly period style and something that sounds too modern.

I blame Kevin Sorbo’s “Adventures of Hercules” (or whatever that TV series was called) for beginning the unholy mix of Americanisms with history/mythic tales. It was cute at the time but I feel it has permeated fiction more than it should have. Is it ignorance? Convenience? Maybe the author is trying to put in a wink-wink moment or deliberately insert a degree of contemporary thought to, in her mind, make the conflict more relevant? I don’t know. Perhaps one of the Julia Quinn-type authors could shed light on this?
Personally, it peeves me, even when the plot and characters are delightful. So I can only imagine (as I’m not a history buff) how it must bother those with a more literary background.

I’m also in the ‘anacronisms don’t bother me til they do’ camp.

I can’t remember the book unfortunately, but I do remember putting it down after reading that the hero had been knocked on his “ass” instead of his ‘arse’. I had to wonder if he had fallen on a donkey?

I recently read A Lady’s Pleasure by Renee Bernard, which I bought because I enjoyed her story in The School for Heiresses anthology. I found the book a pretty good read (I think it’s a first novel), but I nearly put it down before I even got to page 2…because on page 1 something “referenced” something else. As a woman of a certain age, I’ve had to learn to live with “impact” and “access,” and “dialogue” as verbs, but please, please have mercy and don’t ask me to live with “referenced” yet, especially not in an historical romance.

Someone mentioned the movie Beowulf and Grendel…the mixed accents drove me crazy too, never mind that it was just a bad movie IMHO. Though Marie Antoinette was a better film, I had the same problem with accents in it; I was ready to scream by the end, sorry that I wasn’t going to see her get her head lopped off.

Sophie Jordan’s Too Wicked To Tame

Porphyria was not proposed as a “disease of kings” until 1966. The hero obsessing over passing on that malady to his offspring was only the first example of a complete lack of research. Unless, of course, this was a Time-Travel romance involving the hero-protaganist’s family, and then it… still doesn’t work.

But I really liked the colors on the cover. All that red was pretty.

Some anachronisms bother me more than others.  I know people aren’t supposed to say “Hello” before the 20th C. or so, but I’m willing to overlook that.  I’m less forgiving about having the Eiffel Tower as a point of interest in a Regency, the Medieval heroine who calls the hero a “chauvinist” (that one bothered me at many levels) and the Medieval heroine who insists on bathing every night.

I liked the Roberta Gellis scene where the heroine is combing the hero’s hair for nits.  Now, that’s realism!

Hmmm. It depends. Screaming anachronisms annoy me because the author ought to know better. For example, Romans wearing Lorica Segmentata when they should still be in chain mail. However I’m willing to forgive minor stuff as I know how darn hard it is to get it right - you’re an author, not an historian - you can get completely hung up on research.

What annoys me more is anachronistic attitudes. People banging on about freedom and equality in an age when people lived and died knowing their place. But again, there’s fudge factor - this is fiction and I want a good story.

I’m an Aussie with Scottish parents and HATE what people do to Australian and Scots accents. How do Americans think that they can fake every accent convincingly? It makes me cringe. I’d rather put up with American twang than have a constantly slipping fake accent (a la Jessica Lange (?) in Rob Roy - eeeuugh, ruined the movie for me. Can’t roll her R’s at all.)

Ironically I know many Aussie authors who have their work ‘Americanised’ because the editors seem to assume that reader’s can’t cope with the unfamiliar. So ‘paddocks’ become ‘fields’ or whatever you call them, corrugated iron roofs become ‘ripple iron’ (what the?) and so on. They also constantly misuse the word ‘mate’.

um, I meant, foreign authors misuse ‘Mate’. But then that isn’t anacronism is it.

What would you call it… geographical misapropriation or something….

I am with a lot of others on this post when I say it bothers me sometimes but not always. I am a huge history nut and anglophile (I am studying archaeology and lived in England for a few years), but I get that it is well nigh impossible to be totally accurate about everything. For me it is most important to get the general feeling of the time period right, I may cringe when an English Regency miss says ‘okay’ or ‘whatever’ but I have never thrown a book because of it. Bad writing will get a book thrown though.
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!!!  This is Historical Bollocks!!! Brandon married the other Tudor sister Mary, and Margret was married to the King of Scotland and grandmother to Mary Queen of Scotts! That is not a little “ohh she has them wearing this type of corset before it was invented” kind of error i.e. annoying to us dorks that know but not an egregious disregard for any attempt at accuracy.
So to conclude my long and ranty post, I’d have to say that anachronisms can be cute when done well and purposely (ie A Knights Tale)and it is flagrant errors and deliberate disregard that get me. In a perfect world everything would be done like HBO’s ROME and be very nearly perfect but like someone said before i think a little inaccuracy is part of the fantasy. These books are fantasies written to appeal to modern women, it is interesting to think about what our historical counterparts would think of our modern interpretations of their lives…

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.

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.”

corrugated iron roofs become ‘ripple iron’ (what the?) and so on.

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.

I once started a Victorian era novel about a girl stranded on a desert isle with only her tutor. I was fine with the girl being named Victoria until about thirty pages in , when she’s called “Tori”. Then I threw it in the recycling bin because then all I could think of was Tori Spelling and that destroyed the whole story for me.

Tally-ho, chaps and chapesses!

I love this topic.  Great for bitchery.  As a Brit author with American publishers, I’ve been known to rewrite sentences and even paragraphs to avoid ‘gotten’.  Leaps out and screams from the page when it’s used in British dialogue (one could be generous with the Medieval-set books, but I doubt it).

I really think that with accents/slang in books, less is more.  I recently blogged that for a book I once researched a load of Jamaican slang and then threw most of it out, precisely because I’m so tired of reading misplaced slang in British-set books.  Especially those time-travel ones where the burly Highlander tells the wee lassie “Dinna fash yerself,” which sounds like something a baby does in its nappy.  And how come the modern American heroine always understand what the C16th Highlander is talking about,anyway?  I barely understand modern Glaswegians.

As for misunderstood accents, if I had a penny for every time someone asked me which part of Australia I’m from, I’d be a rich little British girl.  When I say I’m not, they apologise and say, “I’m sorry, you must be from New Zealand?”  Usually the person asking is Aussie/Kiwi, or has at least lived there for a long period.  Weird.

Britain’s the biggest little country in the world.  We have more regional accents than any other English-speaking nation.  My parents, Sheffield-born-and-bred, watced The Full Monty and complained that Mark Addy sounded like he was from Barnsley, not Sheffield—which is about twenty miles away.  Brits can usually distinguish American from Aussie accents, although we think everyone from the Antipodes sounds like the cast of Neighbours…

I’m fascinated by the “gotten” thread here. I’m American (San Francisco) and I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word “gotten” used in speech (outside of someone making fun of hicks, “I done gotten me one of them there new-fangled machines.” kind of thing). But it certainly comes up in discussions such as this one every time, so someone out there must be using it. *shudder*

I guess I really wasn’t very clear. It’s not so much that a Brit says to him/herself, “Oh, that American sounds exactly like someone from Australian. However can I tell which is which?” It’s more that people think, “Oh that x accent sounds really similar to y accent. They don’t sound REMOTELY like mine.” It’s a who do you relate to most sort of thing. 

In other words and in a generic sort of way, I know what someone who is from Autralia sounds like and what some one from say, Scotland, sounds like but I think they sound more similar like they’re close cousins and I speak some mutant variation that has words and grammer in common but not accent. (I believe this was the thesis of the paper: similarity instead of sameness.)

Kalen,

I am also from California…here is a common usage:

“Have you gotten the tickets yet?”
“Have you gotten your father a present for his birthday?”

That’s used all over America as far as I know.

Or

“Where have the kids gotten to?”

Oh heck, now that I think about it, for some people who really aren’t sensitive to accents, this may cause in an inablity to distinguish difference outside of home standard entirely. 

How does this apply to period/place lexicon? Well, I’ve met lots of Americans who think that the only vocabulary difference between Autralia and the British Isles is the use of “let’s throw another shrimp on the barbi.”  Perhaps then, for the general reading public that random ‘Okay’ coming from a Regency miss works for them but… for those of us with the sensitive ear, etc. it is surely a dead give away.

I’m not too nitpicky about dialogue, and I’m in the camp of don’t use hi, hello, or okay in the Regency.

However, what does drive me nuts is the use of sarcastic phrases such as “whatever”, or “could it BE more xxz?” Fortunately, I read those in a manuscript I was judging for a writing contest, so I was able to put a little note on the page, but it was enough to yank me by the hair right out of the story. If I hear Chandler, from Friends, in a regency-set story, I’m liable to do a Miss Snark and set my hair on fire.

JMHO

“Have you gotten the tickets yet?”
“Have you gotten your father a present for his birthday?” That’s used all over America as far as I know. Or “Where have the kids gotten to?”

Maybe my friends and family are strange then, because I don’t think we’d use any of those sentences.