Small-Conference Football Hits the Computer Screen

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Did you see the iPAD?

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.