There was a really interesting episode of Slate's Lexicon Valley podcast last week where they interviewed the author. They also talked about Downton Abbey.
Slate's editors and writers watch too much TV.
But does only rarely being in books/TV of the time reliably mean a phrase was rare in speech? It makes that likelier, but wasn't there then a bit more formality in works of fiction? Certainly much less than in other generations, but still not quite the relentless drive toward the vernacular that we have now.
2: Please rephrase that as an analogy between one of Slate's editors and a character from "Mad Men" or "Game of Thrones".
4: I wonder if I still have the "Slate Bingo" sheet I made last summer. I think "Mad Men" and "HBO" were the southwest and northwest corners, respectively. "The Wire" was somewhere closer to the center, like "David Foster Wallace" and "Michael Chabon."
"I need to" and "I ought to" don't seem interchangeable to me, and the replacement suggested, "I have to," is rather different from "I ought to." I mean, what did people of the 60s say instead of "I need to stop at the grocery on my way home today," for instance? Was it "I have to"? If so, why isn't that the comparison we see?
I don't watch Mad Men, so I don't have a direct opinion about it. But when I notice a historical bit of writing going wrong, it's usually less the anachronisms that pop out (they might be there but I'm not noticing, of course) it's an impoverished and repetitive set of period-isms. I wonder if anyone has a way to check for that -- phrases that are absent now, common in real 1960's dialog, but way way too common in Mad Men.
6: Here's the N-gram with "I have to" added. It is more common than either of the other two throughout the period with an upswing similar to "I need to" in recent decades.
And with "I should". "I should" dwarfs the other three, but follows the same pattern as "I ought", dropping in recent decades where "I need to" and "I have to" go up.
Further to 6 et al., in what way is "I need to" is more narcissistic or self-revealing than "I have to"? Is he really suggesting that "I have to" does not invoke "personal needs", while "I need to" does--I guess because of the spelling?
I also did it with third person pronouns which are similar but with the "have/has to" being lower in the past than with first person. The net effect is a relative swing from normative forms to imperative ones.
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I am home sick, and this thread made me want to watch MadMen on Netflix. I discovered that I got a strange green screen when I tried to use my roku.
Anyone ever had this problem?
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7: I've gotten a whiff of that in Georgette Heyer's books. I assume she uses accurate slang, but did they really say it that much?
Sorta OT: Is anyone else offended by the GoT GWB thing? Ned Stark deserved better.
3 has a good point that the difference between the vernacular and books or TV from the era might be relevant, and you can always nitpick the details of phrasing, but frankly, the thing that seems most interesting to me is the analysis itself and how it worked.
Someone wrote a computer program to check every two-word phrase in the scripts of a TV drama and compare its dialogue to everything* published in the decade it's set, all just to see how accurate that show is. 30 years ago, just writing a program to compare one script to another would have been a technical challenge very few people could have done casually. 20 years ago, very few people would have ever expected a comprehensive search of past publications to ever be possible; people didn't think of the Internet like this except in some branches of academia. Even 10 years ago, it would have been very, very hard to be more rigorous about it than "fishing in the online resources to confirm hypotheses," as that guy dismisses here. But today? Someone can reasonably try to compare a work of fiction to everything from the era it's set in, just for kicks. This guy holds human history in the palm of his hand. Wow.
I know singularity-, everything-is-online-, Web-two-and-a-half- triumphalism can be annoying, and if this is, then sorry, but I thought it was cool that this was even possible, let alone casual.
* Not absolutely everything of course, but close enough for this purpose, at least.
16: Limited budget, they went with what they had lying around (so I've read). The more interesting question is why they had a severed GWB head lying around in the first place.
17: But how we write is very different from how we talk. I suppose that with care one could generate a list of texts likely to be written colloquially, but we'll have to wait a few more Moore's Law folding times for that. The simplest would be to look at scripts set the time period in which they were written, but that might not be a sufficiently large set to get decent statistics prior to about 1940 or so, and the Hollywood production code makes things a bit iffy even then.
19: Just looking for dialog in prose would get you pretty far, wouldn't it? Only search texts with some number of paragraphs in which more than half the text is within quotation marks, or something like that.
19: I don't know. Dialogue in fiction often doesn't match actual speech patterns.
For our time though, historians of language will have the perfect source -- transcripts of reality tv shows.
21: "the people of the early 21st century were much like ourselves, except for their paralyzing fear that somnebody would believe them to be there to make friends."
I would assume by the early '60s at least there would be at least something of a corpus of transcribed recordings of people just talking. Although maybe not a broad representation of different groups.
On the podcast, they said that he included transcripts of recorded conversations. They specifically mentioned transcripts of recordings of White House meetings as one source.
20: If you're only comparing dialogue and not regular prose I think many of the problems go away, but that's not how I read 17 (though I can see I may be wrong). There's still a censorship problem, but that just means a human has to tweak things. Or you could satisfice and be done with it. Getting it 100% correct isn't really that important. I think Deadwood benefited from being a little heavier on the cursing than I imagine the old west actually was.
19: I agree, how people write is different than how they talk, like Minivet said and several commenters to the Atlantic article. Even today, when so much entertainment strives for authenticity, you don't see dialogue written the way people speak because people think faster than they speak.
Overheard right now: "Aaand... and then, of course, she's good too, because... yeah, yeah." That's a bit unfair because that guy is particularly inarticulate, and I'm sure it's much more coherent in context to the person he was speaking to, but still, you'd never see that in a novel. Maybe one in a thousand people talks as well as the average fictional character. And you often don't see that in transcripts, because people writing up transcripts of things aren't interested in the chaff of conversations. They clean them up, even if they shouldn't for something like this.
I don't see what that has to do with 19, though. I thought the analysis was impressive because it's still so broad, even if it isn't perfect, that it would have been unimaginable a few decades ago.
Court transcripts--still stilted, and you'd want to exclude the filthy law-talk, but that's just one more place to look for the language as she is spoken.
26.1: Right, when you look at the details of actual conversation we almost all sound like inarticulate idiots. This was one of the "discoveries" of speech recognition and natural language translation work. I've done some work with actual transcripts, and they're a mess, especially for people who can see each other and/or have a lot of shared cultural or personal context.
Bravo to 22. No, seriously, Bravo wants to make this show you're talking about. With the killer robots?
28: +s
For some of us it comes through in writing.
Also, Mad Men could be compared to written dialogue for movies of the early 60s.
32: Which they did. And is in the article.
They specifically mentioned transcripts of recordings of White House meetings as one source.
Over at LGM, discussing Caro, they mention that RFK mostly agreed with LBJ about Bay of Pigs, and disagreed with JFK. But RFK despised LBJ, and of course wanted to support his brother.
Body language, tone, internal states, self-censorship because people are watching (how much nose-picking and ball-scratching do we see on reality-shows?)...we know nothing the past is another country we are not recording anything worthwhile. Or at least so little it doesn't tell us the truth. Recorded words as history makes me laugh.
But this is, interestingly, our history, our reality. This pack of lies. How did RFK feel about Vietnam? Well this is what he said, this is what he wrote, this is what he did. As far as I am concerned that is all fucking lies or self-deception.
Mad Men and Weiner are very good at showing how we are always giving a performance and only realizing it about 1/10 of the time. Who is Don Draper? Fuck if Don knows.
Which I read. But, like, a long time ago.
33: No picking on heebie! She's had a rough day.
Not very rough! Mildly exasperating at times. Mostly a lot of playing w/ Hawaii with half my attention and checking Unfogged with the other half.
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Holiday reading bleg. Going away in a couple of days, expect to have nothing to do but read and swim for a week.
So, preference is for genre type fiction -- more thrillers, spy stuff, SF [not space-opera-y stuff] -- or well-plotted taught literary fiction. I already have non-fiction/philosophy stuff to take away, so this fiction.
Ideas?
>
Taught fiction? or taut fiction?
37: Well, I'm glad it wasn't so bad.
I guess I don't need to stick up for you, then.
40.2: Gee, what a foul weather friend to heebie you turned out to be, peep.
Alternately, James Ellroy, if you haven't read him yet.
38: I enjoyed Ready Player One a great deal.
Walter Jon Williams's This Is Not A Game? There's a sequel, which I haven't read, but the first one was a reasonable near-future thriller: near enough that it's right on the SF/non-SF line.
Mankell is an excellent choice.
re: 45
Yes, and his Angelmaker, too. Enjoyed them both.
re: 43
I've read pretty all of his stuff, until the last couple, where the stylistic tics overwhelmed by desire to keep reading.
re: 39
Argggh. Taut! Not endless digressive first-person bourgeois wank-fiction.
I spent some time cutting a swathe through Le Carre recently. That was worthwhile, if you haven't done it. (But probably everybody's already done that.)
re: 51
Yes, I've read many but not all. Might be worth filling in the gaps.
Wow, and that blogger turns out to be a massive fan too.
You may well have read them already, but Patricia Highsmith's The Tremor of Forgery and The Two Faces of January.
Ooh, good call. I've only read one Highsmith, although I liked it.
Have you been through Michael Innes yet? I'm not sure how in print they are, but even if not, they should be easy to find.
57: xoxo!
ttaM: May we ask where you are going? We could then offer themed suggestions!
I shall go the the grocery this week. I might go today.
Megan, I've wondered about Heyer too; the argument for realism is that there was a lot of in-group-marking slang, and I *think* her younger, more urban, climbing characters are the ones who use it constantly. I expect there's as much of her voice over the research as there is Dorothy Dunnett's over hers, though, and Dunnett now sounds gloriously 1960s.
ttaM, I like the Louis Meyer _Bloody Jacky Faber_ books, and my dad did too. Things happen!
59: No fair. I was about to suggest A Coffin for Dimitrios.
(Also, the new Alan Furst came out yesterday, and it is apparently Paris based.)
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Just went and saw Prometheus. Halford, the WOD, for time, is ten kicks to Ridley Scott's nuts.
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I've been a fan of almost anything I've read on the Soho Press imprint. Recently I liked The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill.
A different TV question. Did you all know that they are reviving Dallas on TNT? I found out yesterday.
Also, the new Alan Furst came out yesterday, and it is apparently Paris based.
That's not the Alan Furst I know.
(Confidential to Alan Furst: Seriously, dude, easy on the "Paris" gear; you're grinding metal.)
67, 68: I believe that this is Crossfit lingo for Workout of the Day.
66: Oh, come now. The last several books have been a boat somewhere, Greece, Poland, somewhere else not Paris.
70: They all stopped in Paris for a gratuitous weekend or two. The Nazis occupied other perfectly nice cities, which would probably like to be written about, Alan.
62: Oh, come now. The last several SF blockbusters have not been any better, especially with regard to plot holes, flat characters and dubious theology and geometry.
re: 58
Greece. Timing it perfectly for the elections, and subsequent impending doom.
I like Furst but he's been phoning it in for ages. The first four or five were all quite different (within the confines of the genre he's chosen), but the last half a dozen have been basically the same novel. Some conspicuously so.
Schmidt has a blog devoted to anachronisms in pop culture. And he responds to some of the objections above here.
I have really serious problems with graphs and mostly need to write the information in them down as numbers, since my visual processing is so shitty. (In other words, visually speaking, I'm pretty dumb.) Those graphs confused me. What was the "density" on the y axis where the x axis was "ratio of modern to period use"?
Yeah, that post could use more explication. I don't know enough about the methods he's using to really add anything, unfortunately.
Presumably that is an estimate of the probability density function (how likely any value is, but not really "any value" due to it being a continuous variable--a frequency histogram with infinitely thin bars is one way to think of it). In his plots you would expect a sample which matched the corpus to be centered about 1:1, while one which had more words which were used more frequently in recent times to be skewed to the right.
To the link in 75, I agree there's little reason to doubt that Mad Men and shows like it are anachronistic - especially the business jargon, which I suspect shows up in magazines relatively quickly.
As I've mentioned before, the name "Megan" for Don Draper's new wife really irritates me. It is a ridiculous anachronism. She should be called Marie-Louise or Marie-Thérèse or Marie-Céleste, or something French-Canadian and Catholic like that.
That said, the occasional anachronism in vocabulary is understandable and probably inevitable and not such a big deal. Where Mad Men really drops the ball has less to do with particular words and phrases, and more to do with the cadence of speech. January Jones as Betty Draper, for example, often sounds more contemporary California than late 1950s Bryn Mawr grad. Betty should sound seriously WASP, but too frequently does not.
Getting the words right is easy. Getting the pronunciation and the modulation and the inflection right is a much more difficult challenge.
My problem with the show is that it's shot with really fancy modern cameras. They should use old shitty cameras from the '60s instead.
62: Oh, come now. The last several SF blockbusters have not been any better
As a fuck you to the audience that movie was masterful. I was pretty pissed off coming out of Cowboys and Aliens but I feel like Prometheus took it to the next level. And the ending! I'm in awe. I'd be hard pressed to think of an ending more at odds with the previous 90 minutes of that film.
25: Not being a historian of the Western US in the late 1800s, I cannot verify the accuracy of the following, but for what it's worth:
David Milch claims that in his research he found that the hard men of the Old West swore copiously, much as hard men do today, as part of a cultivated air of verbal intimidation. The deliberate anachronism of Deadwood is that the swears are modern, because accurate contemporaneous swears of the sort that would have been bandied about would sound comical to modern ears. "By God's blood" and so forth. (He also had some longer justification I cannot recall for the ornateness of speech reflecting a reality of people deliberately embroidering their speech to suggest intelligence and sophistication, for which I also cannot vouch, but the language of Deadwood requires no justification.)
73: Then The Two Faces of January would be a fitting choice.
82: Based on the amount of the film that obviously (I mean really, blatantly obviously) ended up on the cutting room floor, I suspect the ending was from one of the alternate versions.
(Thank god they didn't go with the "we killed Jesus" storyline they were apparently considering.)
38: I found this review intriguing and picked up Slayground, but haven't read it yet.
re: 81
Humourlessly stepping on a joke, but, it's not as if actual 60s cameras would be worse than what they use now. 70mm film [or horizontally running 35mm], really high end anamorphic lenses, etc.
Getting the words right is easy. Getting the pronunciation and the modulation and the inflection right is a much more difficult challenge.
This, exactly. I haven't watched any Mad Men, but this aspect of speech is what I notice first when watching movies set in the 30s-60s vs. movies made in the 30s-60s. There's always the objection that people in those eras may not have had the same speech styles as people in the films in those eras, but the difference between movies/tv made at different times remains.
Ridley Scott should have been shot a long time ago. I can't see why you people only started making a fuss now.
85: Definitely flawed, but it looked beautiful. The ship! The feeling of space! The Iceland landscape pron at the start! The star chart scene! Would watch again.
But it depresses me immensely to think that Noomi Rapace, the Blandest Woman in Sweden, is now an Official Star and is going to be in film after film after film.
Also there is a classic Movies in Fifteen Minutes about it:
http://m15m.livejournal.com/23209.html
HOLLOWAY: But it turns out they were mortal and easily killed by creations they weren't even powerful enough to control. So... we're not special snowflakes, and making life is something any idiot can do. Even people too stupid to live, like us.
SHAW: Except me. As you know. FROM ALL THE YEARS I SPENT FAILING TO BEAR OUR CHILDREN.
HOLLOWAY: Oh, shit--I didn't mean--NON-PROCREATIVE SEXEBRATION?
SHAW: IT'S THE LEAST YOU COULD DO.
Also:
WEYLAND: You are harshing my existential squee. Jackson, pain her in the staples.
SHAW [collapsing]: augh my superglued uterus
...which is literally causing me to chuckle uncontrollably as I type.
As I've mentioned before, the name "Megan" for Don Draper's new wife really irritates me. It is a ridiculous anachronism. She should be called Marie-Louise or Marie-Thérèse or Marie-Céleste, or something French-Canadian and Catholic like that.
It's going to turn out that she's a visitor from the future, which is why she's so irrepressibly progressive. Next season will introduce her brothers Josh and Jonathan, and the other characters will ask why they have the names of grizzled New England retired apple farmers.
Definitely flawed, but it looked beautiful. The ship! The feeling of space! The Iceland landscape pron at the start!
I think that's a big part of why that movie pissed me off so much. That cinematography from the get go had me thinking the movie was going to be awesome.
I really hope there were lots of French Canadians who named their daughters "Marie Céleste". It amuses me.
I've never seen any Mad Men, but does anyone put on a mid-Atlantic accent in it? It seems like something some of the characters might have been patrician enough to do (or the wannabe equivalent), considering it survives in vestigial form even in the speech of a middle-aged relative of mine.