OK, this one's a bit of rant, a bit of humor, and a call for your own comments in the same vein.I just read a book set in Ancient Ireland with the following line in it:
She worked with the Dagda to save her people from cultural annihilation."Cultural annihilation"??? Could the author not have used a simple lesss anaachronistic lline like:
She worked with the Dagda to save her people's very existence.Or just leave off the "'s very existence." Think of the ink it would have saved, along with the people.
So as soon as I told my husband about this one he piped up with something like, "I suppose you could put Earl Sagar (a rather dour fellow from my Anglo Saxon novel, An Involuntary King) standing in a sield wall wondering, 'Am I still relevant? Or should I reinvent myself' and wondering which of the King's companions would be a good life coach for him."
I suppose it would not be beyond imagining that Sir Francis Walsingham might "take a meeting" and present h is "agenda" though his attempts to reach consensus would be precluded not b language but by personality.
Did Mary Boleyn complain of sexual harrassment? Well, maybe not complain...
It certainly would not be out of the question that Julius Caesar would worry about imperialism...
I knwo Robin Hood was definitely trying to live green.
As you see, I am a bit out of touch concerning Boomerspeak.. so I shall rely on you for deliverables like that.
Interesting observation about the spin we "moderns" tend to put on the past when we read and write. I am writing a novel set in Hungary in 1951, and even that setting is a challenge. I find myself having to be very careful not to impose my 21st-century-American viewpoint on my characters. It's much harder than most readers realize.
ReplyDelete--Connie Hampton Connally
True, Nan, I get very upset about linguistic anachronism. Even Anya Seton's classic Katherine is full of it. The wife of John of Gaunt says, in direct speech, she will not be 'molly coddled' (19thc)!
ReplyDeleteBut just as dangerous is to impose a modern mindset on folk who would have been incapable of certain thoughts. (Eco was accused of doing that in The Name of the Rose, but ducked the question.)
I was once rightly chastised for having a 16thc man say: 'Nature had intended me to be xxx'. No, in the 16thc it would God, not Nature, who intended you to be something. 'Nature' was invented by Francis Bacon in the early 17thc...