‘Downton’ Grrrr

February 15, 2012, 12:01 am

You may just possibly know that there’s currently a popular program on the telly called Downton Abbey. If you follow language blogs and language gossip (yes, there is such a thing), you will probably be equally aware of the current kerfuffle involving verbal anachronisms on the show.

The rumblings started last fall with an article in the British broadsheet The Telegraph, complaining that Downton characters used such not-yet-coined (in the 1916-20 period in which the action takes place) words and expressions as get shafted, fed up, and boyfriend. (The piece also found fault with the line “So everything in the garden is rosy?” the particular gripe being that this expression–hitherto unfamiliar to my ears–didn’t enter the lexicon until the 1920s. I say, big schmeel! My problem with the line is the sentence-starting So, a wise-guy Americanism that surely dates from no farther back than the 40s. And by the way, I once heard a Downton character actually say “he had a problem with” someone. I will take credit for outing that egregious anachronism, until I’m informed otherwise.)

The peripatetic and formidable language commentator Ben Zimmer picked up the ball and added a few more offenders to the list, including:

I’m just sayin’ (to defuse a comment)
Step on it
Floozy
Contact (as a verb)
Uppity
When push comes to shove
I couldn’t care less

Then Zimmer put together a hilarious video mashup of DA rum notes; to date it has had 27,566 views on YouTube.

The most recent advancement of the argument was made Monday by Ben Schmidt on his Sapping Attention digital humanities blog. He observed that up till now, commentators

have relied, so far as I can tell, on finding a phrase or two that sounds a bit off, and checking the online sources for earliest use. …

I thought: why not just check every single line in the show for historical accuracy? Idioms are the most colorful examples, but the whole language is always changing. There must be dozens of mistakes no one else is noticing. Google has digitized so much of written language that I don’t have to rely on my ear to find what sounds wrong; a computer can do that far faster and better. So I found some copies of the Downton Abbey scripts online, and fed every single two-word phrase through the Google Ngram database to see how characteristic of the English Language, c. 1917, Downton Abbey really is.

“Not very,” was his finding. Immediately popping up were a whole bunch of brand-new anachronisms, including fingerprint (as a verb), moral high ground, heaven’s name, basic tips, having (to mean eating), and realistic, basic, and major as adjectives. Upping the ante, Schmidt put together some remarkable graphs for specific episodes, in which every single two-word phrase is plotted according to its overall frequency in the period, and its over- or underrepresentation in the show.

Pretty amazing stuff; you should check it out. But does it really matter? That is, in 1591, Shakespeare had his character Richard III say, “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” Would the real Richard III have used the noun discontent when he lived well over 100 years earlier? Not likely. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word was coined in–what do you know?–1591 by a certain playwright from Stratford-on-Avon. Yet you don’t see people making video mashups of anachronisms in Shakespeare.

The reason relates to something a smart teacher told me a long time ago. He employed a barnyard epithet that I am told I cannot use in Lingua Franca. So I’ll substitute. Anyway, he basically said, “There is nonsense, and there is good nonsense.” I would apply that to television. That is, it is absurd to expect realism on TV, whether in depiction of hospital procedures, workplace banter, family life or upper-class English talk of any period. But what one can expect is good nonsense, an artfully and thoughtfully made world that is at least plausible enough that one can enjoyably suspend one’s disbelief. I know that many would disagree with me, but I feel that on this score, Downton Abbey’s anachronisms are a symptom of its larger imaginative failings.

What’s more, a native Englishman tells Lingua Franca that the show’s errors are hardly limited to language. He says the show is totally unrealistic because of the “fact that there is very little physical and verbal abuse of the servants; the lack of overcoats in the house in the winter; the beautiful clean clothing all the while; the absence of derogatory language about the Germans, and the French; and the good complexions and clean teeth.” And of course, he adds, there’s the sun.

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nyhist

reminds me of a long-ago PBS biography when Samuel Adams announced that he was going to ‘organize the grass roots’!
http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

Surely this is to Cameron what Blur were to Blair. Conservatism that has gone beyond “caring” to completely clueless. Downton Abbey must be their version of the past.
lisagailt

Well, I caught “suck up” on Sunday night, which as I am NOT a linguist I will rely on others to tell me that surely that wasn’t in usage, and if it was, certainly not by the upper ten thousand. And then they read Bates his Miranda rights (english version) when they arrested him!

janfreeman

OED:

5. intr. to suck up to , to curry favour with; to toady to. (Also without to.) slang (orig. Schoolboy slang). Cf. sucker-up n. at sucker n. Compounds 2.
1860

J. C. Hotten Dict. Slang
(ed. 2)
,
Suck up, ‘to suck up to a person’, to insinuate oneself into his good graces.1876

‘A. Thomas’ Blotted Out xvi,
I can’t suck up to snobs because they happen to be in power and to have patronage.1899

E. Phillpotts Human Boy 203
Fowle sucked up to him‥and buttered him at all times.1905

H. A. Vachell Hill vi,
‘Afterwards’, John continued, ‘I tried to suck-up. I asked you to come and have some food.’
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=649046156 Brett Fechheimer

The right to silence was not invented in the United States with the Miranda ruling. It has a very long history in Britain, and I’m certain Julian Fellowes and his researchers found that ascertaining which version police officers used upon arresting suspects in 1919 was among their easiest research tasks.

adeshane

If accuracy were important in TV drama, CSI and other investigative cop shows would not be so popular, but they are because they’re fun. Same with DA, though I’ll admit I have flinched at a few phrases. For the most part, it’s much ado about nothing.
minnesotan

Quit criticizing the few thoughtful, well-written shows we get on television, or they’ll take them away and fill the slots with more alien/ghost/bigfoot hunting. It’s bad enough that the History Channel is now the Conspiracy Channel, and the SciFi Channel has admitted that science is no longer apt, thereby changing their name to SyFy (the “Sy” apparently meaning ignorant viewers who actually believe in ghosts and angels and leprechauns; i.e. not our original audience members who were aware of the fantasy and were delighted by exploring the questions speculative fiction raises).
darccity

Yes, my wife and I eagerly look forward to every episode. But it is a trashy show with absurdly contrived and outrageous plot line. However, unlike “Upstairs, Downstairs” almost 4 decades earlier, the writers don’t need to worry that the audience will be offended by inaccuracies from their memories. As an experiment, try rewatching the “classics” from the 1930′s Golden Age of Hollywood: costumes off the rack from the wrong century, hopelessly inappropriate stage sets and music, and comical accents. At least Downton actors have tried for accents, costumes, vehicles, and sets to let viewers “suspend disbelief.” And all but the most egregious errors go unnoticed in the breakneck cuts to and from each of a dozen simultaneous soap opera plot lines – a novel application from genre like today’s detective shows.
pak152

this is why it is called entertainment. i don’t expect slavish attention to detail in a TV show or movie. The term “poetic license” comes to mind
davidlspeer

I was OK with it until “sucking up” was uttered (twice) in an episode. Jarred me right out of my suspension of disbelief.

http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

presumably “sucking up to s.o”, which is not anachronistic, see comment by janfreeman

11191774

Methinks the dude doth protest too much.
medinfoguy

Not representing myself as a language scholar, I am however a librarian, a history buff, and had the equivalent of an English minor in undergrad (notwithstanding my poor grammar here). I also look out for anachronisms on anything smacking of historical issues, and the ‘sucking up’ reference jumped out at me immediately. I see this kind of thing in a lot of other historical dramas in recent years, a notice that I attribute more to my being a pedant than to being a bona fide expert. However, with Downton I try to overlook such things because of the way it [self-consciously] points out WWI’s effects on society, from the shaking of class-based traditions, to losing so many young men, to the advent of the Spanish influenza epidemic. If anything, I guess we can look at the language issues as a way of left-handedly emphasizing the decline of formality that was developing in communication and society.
duppy_conqueror

and at 1:08 in the video, what’s with “What’s with patrolling…”. “Logic pill” didn’t bother me as much as “what’s with…” Oh God, now I have to start actually watching the program.
11151335

Wait a minute. Merriam-Webster says the first use of floozy was 1911. So it’s not anachronistic in 1916. I wonder about all these others now.

minnesotan

This is a good point. Add to this the fact that all those hip young dictionary editors do not always have their fingers on the pulse of the nation, and we see how meaningless these claims can be. I mean, do all of the words you use today show up in the dictionary? Will they all? And if they do, can the dictionary possibly track down a word’s first use? Its first appearance in mainstream print, perhaps, but some words take longer to hit the mainstream than others. “Floozy,” for instance, could have been regional, part of an inderground sub-culture, or even adopted/expropriated from a similar foreign slang term well before the dictionary first finds a quote in the mainstream press.

fledermaus

Will we expect every historical film be shot in “chronologically-adequate” dialogue and with decorum? Despite the literary works we have from those times, the language in those works was, in most cases, precisely that, literary. Yes, it would be nice, but that’s Utopia, and for audiences would need clarifying subtitles. Otherwise be ready to see films in Old English, Middle English, and so on, but distillated through the minds of 21st Century screenwriters.

Even Mel Gibson’s attempts are colourful vignettes in that sense. Jean-Jacques Annaud was wise when he shot “The Quest for Fire” (“La guerre du feu”, 1981), set 80,000 years ago and all characters simply groaned. He had to hire Anthony Burgess as Creator of Special Languages.
kingericred4ever

Who’s to say people didn’t say these sorts of things in the time period? All the OED can tell you is the earliest a word usage has been documented. On the flip side, if we were to insist that scriptwriters stick to words and usages that were common when the thing was set, we could create a whole new cottage industry of professional pedants or, as they will be called in the year 2134, “poopsleaddamers” who will spend years of their life insuring historical accuracy.
dank48

MWCD10 says “contact” as a verb meaning to make contact with dates from 1834, and “uppity” goes back to 1880.

And so what? In one edition of Conan Doyle’s The White Company, Anthony Burgess has a delightful essay focusing on Doyle’s fictional English, an English that was never spoken but that works within the context of the novel.

Heaven knows how many anachronisms there are in, say, Shakespeare in Love or The Lion in Winter.
ccchron

it can’t be just a matter of checking certain phrases in one dictionary or another, and if we find the phrase cited somewhere earlier than the show is set, it’s ok. There’s also the matter of whether _these_ characters would use such phrases. In other words, class, but also region, and even individual personality. For realism, we shouldn’t see every character identically up to speed on what the OED has approved. Look at how long, even today, catch phrases linger among the clueless.

the difference between neologism (Shakespeare) and anachronism (DA) should be underlined. Bringing in the “discontent” example just muddies the issue.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=649046156 Brett Fechheimer

Interesting!
http://www.facebook.com/francis.hamit Francis Hamit

As someone who write historical fiction about the American Civil War, I’ve been very careful about using the appropriate period language and still fall into error. Recently a purist friend of mine remonstrated with me about the use of one apostrophe. It is “Colt’s revolver” he said, not “Colt revolver.” But this is television. In 1978, for an article I was doing, I queried the famous television producer Stephen Cannell about some factual errors in a new television series. His reply was short and to the point. “Hey, kid. We’re not making a documentary. It’s entertainment.” He added that most of the audience didn’t know and most of the rest didn’t care about these little gaffes — and that they had to produce an episode every week. Downton Abbey provides a sense of a different time and place, but it’s an alternative universe at best, not the one our grandparents knew. Perhaps we should just relax and enjoy the ride.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=649046156 Brett Fechheimer

“Mad Men” inspires similar attention to the historical accuracy of its dialogue (as well as to the historical accuracy of its fonts, clothing, typewriter models, and on and on) from its own intensely devoted fan base. The scrutiny is, if anything, more nit-picky from the fans of “Mad Men,” perhaps because so many of its viewers were alive and forming memories during the era it depicts. The New York Times ran an article on this topic in 2010, which is worthy of a read: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25FOB-onlanguage-t.html
gfrasz

I have a historical linguistic question. Often when watching a supposed drama set in the pre-20th century, I catch (and cringe at) the use of contractions in the script. My question is how common were the usage of contractions in English in the pre-20th centrury?

peekcrief

There isn’t any reason to cringe at spoken contractions in pre-20th century English. Spoken and written English have always diverged, with the educated standard of the latter often taking many decades (or even, in the case of contractions,centuries) to catch up with the realities of the former. While it was once frowned upon to overuse contractions in educated writing, 19th-century authors who attempted to replicate the way people actually spoke, such as Mark Twain (see, for example, this excerpt), were contraction-giddy.

Obviously we have no recordings of speech that predate the very early 20th century, so it’s impossible to know precisely how often any segment of people used contractions in spoken English in, say, the 19th century. My belief is that they were used by nearly all social classes just as often as they are today. I can provide more evidence, but I don’t want to get too long-winded.

jcn8139

It’s a TV series, not a historical documentary.
jcn8139

Did you see the iPAD?
http://www.facebook.com/lvasvari Louise O. Vasvári

Linguists are driven crazy by this kind of constant linguistic anachronisms in films.
alan_gunn

The show’s worst inaccuracies are legal. Much of the first season’s plot turns on the great difficulties created by the estate’s being entailed, which means that a distant relative no one had even met will get the estate when the Earl dies. In fact, a tenant in possession (i.e. the Earl) could convert an entail to a fee simple (basically, ordinary ownership) just by signing and filing a piece of paper. Furthermore, the entail supposedly applies to Cora’s fortune, which had been “added to the estate.” No such thing: estates in land (like entails) applied to real property only; there was never any such thing as entailed money, stocks, bonds, etc. Every first-year law student learns these things (or at least they did when I was a first-year law student).

Sure, it’s only melodrama. I wouldn’t mind so much if the producer hadn’t made an episode about how they did all this in which he boasts about his passion for accuracy.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=8844436 Janet Golden

Whoa….are you saying institutions of higher education should be about education? What next Tenured Radical? Will you be asking that health care be about promoting health, not profits? But, seriously, shouldn’t the question not be about testing rubrics but about what makes a good society and isn’t the answer, investing in people, not pigskin!
Socratease2

You are right, Claire, athletics and academics have completely separate budgets. You could have stopped right there. Characterizing this as a zero-sum game where money for the athletics budget “took away” the computer science department is completely disingenuous (but oh so predictable). So any conclusions drawn from this misguided comparison are not helpful to understanding either curriculum support or athletics funding. I still don’t fully understand why they wished to cut the computer science program but it is not uncommon these days to hear of departments being cut and the former faculty farmed out to “related departments” in the name of efficiency (perhaps a euphemism for running off expensive tenured faculty). We already know that Florida does not need any more anthropology majors.

I share your hope that the existence of athletics on campus would be integrated into the overall “academic mission” (pretty hazy term, however) of an institution and that efforts would be made to show that participation in athletics does provide valuable skills and experiences that promote personal growth and development while in college. To those who say preemptively that athletics can’t teach anything useful, I say you don’t understand the meaning of the word useful.

But, leave Pynchon aside, your ideas for “educationalizing” sports is more a Kafkaesque effort. I don’t understand why you care who starts and who is on the scout team. You can be coached very successfully and still not be on the travel squad, that argument is absurd. Walk-ons are getting zero dollars in support, you know that, right? Football “mission statements”? Sounds like a good set up for a Letterman Top 10 list. What are they going to say “Play the game the right way,” “Honor over victory?” I am fine if they do have a personal mission statement but don’t know what that will mean to anyone. But every team has very specific “team rules” and athletic departments do have mission statements that cover all sports. Most history majors are taking 5-6 years to graduate these days as well and they aren’t dinged the time and energy athletes are during their time on campus. Sure, plenty of college kids work 20-30 hours a week and their time for academics is shortened as well so the classic definition of a college student as a “first time enrolled, 4 year window” graduate is useless for anyone, athlete or not, in today’s higer education. And D-1 football programs do have constant reviews, the NCAA does it on a daily basis. Have you seen the NCAA rulebook that covers rules pertaining to academics and athletics? All athletic departments have periodic external reviews and also have faculty oversight groups that are charged with protecting student-athlete welfare.

Is it all a perfect system of accountability and transparency? Hell no, but then again neither is our “democratic system” of government or any other social institution.
alan_kors

Thanks for writing this. It is simply astonishing that most universities are known nationally for their football and basketball teams and that our campuses basically serve as farm teams for professional sports, which reap the rewards of not having to support such farm teams themselves. The place and salaries of coaches in academic life are beyond parody. How about this for a radical suggestion: campuses should admit students by the educational criteria they normally would apply, which will vary, and those regularly admitted students should form athletic teams of actual students if they wish to compete for enjoyment in sports?
johnvknapp

Look closely folks. U of Florida priorities is what one gets by electing a Republican governor, and a Republican-led legislature, and a Republican-dominated Board of Governance. For the sake of lower taxes for all those wealthy retirees, educating the next generation takes a back seat to public entertainment. Bread and Circuses, they used to call it — back when — and, in Florida, those in charge apparently still do.

JVK

alan_kors

Yeah, I miss those Democratic days in Florida when football was unimportant and love of education occupied the center stage…..

11207833

A couple of years back at Florida State (as ‘reported’ in The Onion): http://www.theonion.com/articles/florida-state-university-to-phase-out-academic-ope,5425/
jsibelius

Oooo…an intriguing thought. I’ve been having the same sort of argument with myself over high tuition and fees and how much it actually costs to run a university. Student fees and student activities holds about the same position in my mind. Now I just have to figure out how to dig in to top-heavy administrative structures, which I suspect is based on politics and fund-raising.
old nassau’67

Two separate budgets: How about two separate admission processes? Teaching SAT Prep in Georgia high schools for 15 years, I saw athletes whose SAT’s were 300-400 points below the freshman average admitted to UGA, GaTech, Miami, UF, FSU. Even the Jan Kemp scandal did little to change the culture. How about two separate undergrad worlds: at UGA and Tech, I saw separate dorms, cafeterias, athletic facilities, tutors, even courses and chosen Profs. Most – not all (e.g. Tim Tebow) - foot- and basket- ball players had as much in common with the ordinary student as Roman gladiators had with Roman citizens. As Prof. Potter emphasizes, not the reality but the hypocrisy, of big-time college athletes is disgusting.
drj50

I don’t always agree with TR, but there’s a lot here to ponder. As someone who has worked a lot with assessment and program evaluation, I find the proposal re. evaluating athletic programs to be thoughtful and, well, kind of compelling. Sounds like a great idea to me. What’s sauce for the goose . . .
http://twitter.com/bananality Eli Carrotheart

Thank you! What an interesting event. Everyone was very polite, but no crickets.
jiminnc

Finances aside:
Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic says that the suicide of 43-year-old former superstar Junior Seau, on top of all the suicides of former players that have been linked to football-related brian damage (it’s too soon to know for Seau), means that it no longer seems ethical for him to watch footballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/05/junior-seau-is-dead/256664/with followup athttp://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/05/junior-seau-is-dead-cont/256722/
academictacos

The football issue deeply bothers me, and the reason why was pretty seriously illustrated to me today on the way to the IT office, where I had to dodge construction workers for the giant new luxury skyboxes my university is adding to the football stadium despite yet another disappointing year for our team and despite the fact they are now talking about cutting back my health benefits.

This crap with the “two pots” gets trotted out at every University I’ve ever been at when people complain about the glaring inequality in funding and treatment. When did the term “reification” go out of style for academics? Those two pots weren’t born endless and unchanging like that, the budget system was set up by _someone_ for some _reason_. And if people who were in charge at the University and the State government level actually wanted a change, they could change it. Would it be easy? Not necessarily. Would it be complicated? Yes. But the Skycaptain didn’t hand this funding scheme down on stone tablets.

The fact is the funding schemes universities have now are about protecting the privileges of football players. They’re virile, masculine. Football players are all guys. Professors are obviously effeminate, and an increasing majority of our undergraduates are ladies. Lets not pretend this is because we can’t get someone from the School of Business to sort out the way you’d change a University’s funding arrangment.
Sioux96

Wait. There are blogs about the English language and language gossip?
Socratease2

Claire, there are way more than “two pots,” one academic and one athletic. Why can’t there be one university with one name and different numbers of cost centers or budget silos? That is a rhetorical question because of course the answer is that, yes, there are more than two. By your logic, the University of Washington Medical Center would have to stop using the University’s name.So…looks like some bull$hit logic to me.

And why don’t you address the real culprit here? As others have pointed out, it is the the drastic and unfortunate cuts in state spending that are devastating higher education. You can light athletics on fire and fiddle while it burns, but where is your indignation about Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae and Mac and all the rest of the corporate swindlers who raped this country and set it down the road to ruin. The state can not fund the academic needs of the university and the university was forced to make some tough funding decisions. I know it feels good to hate athletics but beware of easy targets, keep your eyes on the prize. Actually that would be a good mission statement.
hank_devereaux_jr

According to the NCAA’s own data, in 2009, only 14 of the 120 BCS (formerly D1-A) athletics programs reported positive net generated revenues (the difference between revenues and expenses). Generated revenues are produced by the athletics department and include ticket sales, radio and TV receipts, alumni contributions, royalties, NCAA distributions, etc.)

At the 14 BCS universities, where the athletics budget was in surplus, the median net generated revenue for athletics departments was $4.4 million. So, in these cases money is able to flow from the athletics budget into the academic budget of the university.

At the other 106 BCS universities, the athletics department didn’t generate enough in revenues to cover their expenses and money flowed from the university’s general fund and student fees into the athletics department. At these 106 universities the median net deficit was $11.3 million.

Athletic programs do occasionally subsidize academic programs — but this occurs at a very small number of universities.

Athletic budgets and academic budgets are not totally independent. At universities where the athletics programs are running deficits, the university provides additional funding from tuition revenues, student fees, etc., to balance the athletic budget. At the 14 universities where the athletics program is in surplus, the money can flow the other way.

See: Revenues & Expenses: 2004-09, NCAA Division I Intercollegiate Athletics Programs Report.