Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

I remember being really annoyed when, in a 19th century period romance, the heroine and hero were saying “okay” and “alright.” (Don’t even get me started on ‘alright’.)

I remember the medieval where the heroine called the hero a “chauvinist”.  I still have the dent in my wall.

There’s one reference that I occasionally read in historicals that pulls me out of the story with a jerk. When a character is ill, they are often cupped. Unfortunately, many authors haven’t done their research and just assume that cupping = bleeding. Not so. Two entirely different things. Cupping uses glass bowls suctioned onto the body to stimulate circulation. It’s an old folk remedy that is frequently used today by pracititioners of Chinese Medicine. Bleeding is removing blood from the body in order to stimulate a different reaction.

Every time I read it, I know the author has assumed that previous authors got it right. That always makes me question every other historical aspect of the novel. How much else are they assuming that isn’t correct? I can’t just settle in and enjoy the world and the story anymore.

**steps off soapbox**

Don’t think I’ve posted before, but being a history geek more than a romance geek, I do feel I can comment on this one.

I remember in one of Patrick O’Brien’s novels, set during the War of 1812, there’s a hilarious (to the reader) discussion of accents, from Stephen Maturin [the Irishman]’s POV, wherein this New Englander with this “harsh metallic bray” of an accent is talking about how untainted his speech is. It never occurred to me to doubt it-- but then, O’Brien never gave much reason to doubt any of his historic stuff.

I do love the historic details that to a casual nitpicker seem wrong-- like, in 1900 New York City, even the lower-class ragamuffins being literate-- I do love to note how sophisticated previous generations were despite being “in olden times”.

But these jarring details-- they only work if you have faith in the author. They have to get the basics right, have their historical credibility established without a hitch, before they can throw in the real wacky details. And as someone above pointed out, when the author shows that they’ve been copying details from previous books without doing their own research, that’s a big turnoff.

I can’t help it, I’m a sucker for a good Scottish historical (and/or time travel).  Now that I’m writing my own, and researching the history, I’m finding so many glaring errors in the history of books I read it’s almost making me unable to read them.

So here’s my soapbox.

Let’s get one thing straight: THERE WERE NO “CLAN TARTANS” UNTIL THE EARLY 1800s.  Nope.  Nada.  Maybe weavers in a certain area favored similar patterns, but there’s no proof.  Men of clans often wore several different setts of tartan (and by the way, “plaid” is the garment itself, “tartan” is the pattern) - often at the same time.  So you can’t have Scotsmen in the 1700s, much less the 1400s or, God help us, the 1200s being identified by the tartan they’re wearing.

Oh, and speaking of dress through the centuries.  “Kilts” (here meaning the feilidh-mhor: “great kilt” or “belted plaid") weren’t the standard of dress in the medieval period.  So for those authors who have their heroes in kilts any time before about the late 16th century, PLEASE do a quick fact check.

All of this information is immediately apparent with a Wikipedia search or in the front of any book on clan tartans.

And this isn’t even touching on the cultural attitudes/understandings, or language/vocabulary (hint for time-travel writers: only the wealthy and educated Highlanders knew English.  Any other characters, villagers and the like, will only speak Gaelic.) issues I’ve come across. 

*Taking deep breath and stepping down off the box now*

Much of American v. British accents had (have) to do with class.  The higher the class of American, the fewer differences with British counterparts. Think Kate Winslet in Titanic. Her accent in that film was intentional—a British actress subduing her Britishness in order to convey an old-family American.

In a Regency, wouldn’t an upper class Brit would find low class accents from his own country more grating than an upper class accent from America? Also, a Brit would recognize British accents and immediately place them within a social hierarchy (ie Cockney accent = working & possibly poor, or Norfolk = rural), a process that would attach more stigma to them, beyond just their sounds.

Oooh, I was just reminded of a book I loathed, and the anachronisms just added icing to the cake.  The heroine was a “Robin Hood” character in the middle ages who rode around at night robbing the taxman and giving the money back to the poor.  In this novel the downtrodden hovel dwelling English peasants were paying their taxes in gold, and the heroine went on her nightly forays dressed in black velvet.

OK first appeared in print in 1839, so depending on when in the 19th century the book was set, it’s possible that the term was in use. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I read a contest entry a while back where a modern, twenty-something woman called the hero a cad.  Yeah, I use that one all the time, too.

In the ONE Cassie Edwards I’ve read, her characters said “way” incessantly- in the “way too ill” or “way too far” sense, not in the “I’ll show you the way there” sense. 
It drove me beyond bonkers. “far too...” just seems much more historically appropriate.

Really, Becky? Coz I always call ‘em rakes.

Warning, longish post.

I have two issues, one of which is only tangentially related to the question.

Issue 1.  A well known author using the term ‘sadist’ in a novel set in 17th C. America.  Stopped reading the book and promptly gave it to the USB.  The Marquis de Sade wasn’t around til the second half of the 18th C. and the term was not coined until the late 19th C. (Thanks to the Britannica for the last part)

Issue 2.  Use of foreign language.  Right now I volunteer to read any and all WIPs in which the author is using Spanish.  First of all, there are quite a few dialects of the language (Mexican spanish is not the same as Argentinean is not the same as Castilian is not the same as Cuban, etc).  Second, even if the author gets the (for example) Mexican dialect correct, there are variations between generations, if the character was born/raised in the US, etc. 

I cannot tell you how many times I have picked a book, fervently hoping that the author/editors have managed to use correct spelling and grammar (I don’t even hope for the right Spanish anymore), only to be dissappointed.  It pulls me right out of the story and I don’t buy the author for a few years, enough to forget the pain. 

Sorry.  Rant is (almost) over.

It’s cojones people, not cajones.

Off the soapbox now.

I think that people in the US forget that regional accents were once stronger and more localized than they are now.  I remember reading the biography of Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire where they were talking about the Devonshire eccentricities of speech, yaller for yellow is the one I particularly remember and gel for girl.  I thought it fairly obvious that they were probably using some local dialet lower status dialect.  In fact read aloud it sounds a lot like the all but wiped out Appalachian dialect of my grand parents.

I was a textile historian for a while, so don’t get me started on silk chemises, and heroines of non-Regency periods not wearing corsets, and velvet everywhere.

The latest almost-throwing-book-at-the wall episode for me was when the heroine refuses the rich hero who loves her because she’s enjoying being a seamstress (much more than she enjoyed being a governess). And she goes home each afternoon to the room she rents that she has to herself.

The reality? Female textile workers were one of the most exploited and under-paid groups. If I’d been a seamstress working in London in the early 1800s, I’d have married the devil himself to escape from 18-20 hour days every day working in bad conditions and sharing a room above the workshop with the other workers for very little (if anything) above ‘board’ and lodging.

GGGGGRRRRRRRR.

“It’s cojones people, not cajones.”

I’d noticed this, but I thought maybe it was the polite version, like people sometimes say ‘sugar’. But yes, ‘cajones’ means drawers i.e. a piece of furniture.

Supposedly there’s a dialect in Southern Massachusetts which is as close to the Shakespearean “accent” which modern linguists can find.

And my old New England relatives had an accent which was NOT the Good Will Hunting Boston Accent at all. But it does sound mildly English. (For example, all “a” s are broad. Hahlf n Hahlf is poured in coffee, the back of your leg is a cahlf, the sister of your mother is your awnt. My great-grandmother as a child famoulsy used to shake envelopes when they pickled them up the mail. Her grandmother had said that the mailmen “sorted” the mail, and her grandaughter thought she had said “salted.” The pronounciation was somewhere between sawted and sauhted.)

So I’m not totally sure that ALL American accents would grate to the ear. But I dunno. Might sound enough non-English to be noticeable, though perhaps not grating.

As pointed out above, the English are much more aware than most of the social hierarchy of various accents, so maybe it’s an issue that just seems contrived for American readers?

I suppose too, getting back to the ARC in question, that whether or not the American accent sounds “grating” would depend on one’s relationship with the speaker.  If you’re attracted to the American lady, you might find her accent charming or lilting.  If you don’t like her, you might find it grating.

I have just finished up a book that had Lords and Ladies, horses and carriages, candles, inns...the whole historical nine yards. Yet half way through I went back to read the first few chapters again, to try figure out if this was an alternative universe, or if I had plain got it wrong and it was more contemporary than I thought.
It got to the point I laughed out aloud at the glaring contemporary language.

Pity, because it was a reasonable story otherwise.

I am laughing over the pronunciation posts. Being a New Zealander, I get asked every day to repeat my name as everyone thinks I have the great and wonderful name of Dibee.
D e b b i e...oh! d eahr bee!
Wasn’t that just what I said? Now I just fake it, I’m getting pretty damn good at being a southern princess these days.

Okay, I got a soap box too. It’s only partly related to history, but it’s all about le language.

Those French accents.

The use of French words in general, for that matter. Argh!

“Ma petite chérie”, and “mais, oui” and whatever else French people are supposed to say. We don’t.  No one will call a woman “ma petite chérie” m’kay? ‘Cause it ranks very high on the Eeeww Scale (that by which all is weighed and measured and spanked good). You say that to a little girl, a kid, not to the heroine who you’ll have sex with. So those Eurotrash vamps who keep calling their bee-stung lipped heroine (remember the list of tired-old-romance-words?) ma petite chérie, please, someone shoot them. Or drag them to a tanning salon and LET THEM FRYYYY!!

Ok. Time for my meds.

I’m a knitter and a history buff and I study botany. The combination can drive me insane when reading historic novels. In fact, I’ve quit reading historic novels set before about 1800 because I just can’t take it any more. Things making me bonkers include:

Anyone other than the very rich wearing knitted socks before about 1500. Before that, wearing kilt hose was about as accurate as wearing the kilt itself. The idea of a knitted shirt has only been around since about the 1600s, and then first for the rich.

Foods or plant-based drugs being eaten or used before they were introduced. I know, sounds really nit-picky, but it’s pretty obvious that New World plants were NOT around before the New World was discovered. (That includes potatos, tomatos, corn, tobacco, and quinine, thank you very much.) Even AFTER the New World was discovered, many of those products were only available to the very rich for a long time.

Chocolate. New World plant. Not made into solid chocolate as we think of it until the 1800s, and not affordable to the masses until the 1900s. Until then it was consumed as hot chocolate, and THAT’S ALL. Don’t get me started on chocolate chip cookies.

I’ll stop now. But you get the idea.

I write about this kind of thing all the time on my weblog. What I find really sad and strange is that people who otherwise write a good story don’t spend even a minimal amount of time on researching the language(s) of the people they are writing about. They just plow ahead and turn up turds.

Julie Ann Long writes Regencies which are quite well put together, but the language stuff? terrible.

There are some expressions that make me cringe, such as “could care less” or “off off”. I don’t know if these were part of everyday speech in the past but they’re definitely not part of mine (Australian English) now (we say “couldn’t care less” and just one “off"). I also get annoyed when Regency characters use sexual terminology that weren’t used in that context during the time period. It makes me feel like I’m reading porn because all of a sudden, the words are out of context.

I’m sure I miss a lot of other details, though (including ones that have been mentioned by other commenters). I usually gloss over descriptions anyway, so even if I *knew* they were wrong, I might miss them in the reading (unless I’m editing and then I tend to get a bit compulsive). A friend of mine was turned off one of my favourite novels because there was a story about a tiger drowing and she knows that tigers can swim. We all have our buttons.

I don’t always blame the author, though. It depends how egregious the error is, and how easy it would have been to look it up in the first place. I appreciate author’s notes where deliberate errors are discussed, so at least I know that they were done on purpose and for a reason.

Darlene - grating or endearing? I think it could go either way. He could be attracted to her and hate that he is, thus she grates on him.

And I am going to find a vacant bar and found myself Ye Olde Chauviniste Clubbe.

Something I thought was wrong but it turned out not to be.  Dreadful 1980’s Warner Regency.  A dinner contained tomatoes.  Ah, ha, I have you.  Tomatoes were commently thought to be poisonous until the Victorian era.

Checked Wikipedia and found out that I was wrong.  Tomatoes were being eaten in Britain from mid 1700’s on.  I slink off.

There’s actually quite a good theory stating that the Shakespearean English accent might have sounded quite a lot like the modern American accent.  Granted, Shakespearean England probably isn’t as attractive as it could be to writers of time-travel romances, possibly because of all the plague.

Hands off my cajones!

Recently I read a book where the hero was a Cuban American and his Spanish drove me bugnuts! He would say things meant to sound sexy and the words, while technically correct, weren’t right. It was as if someone ran it through Babel Fish or something, you know? Close, but not quite right. It came off stilted.

There’s an interesting American history text called ‘The Americans: The Colonial Experience’ by Daniel J Boorstin. In this there are 3 chapters devoted to ‘Language & the Printed Word’.

He mentions that 1) most of the original settlers came from the same areas; London, the Midlands & southern England, 2) there was a whole lot of exploring & moving around, which meant not as much regional variation.

Several 18th century travellers remarked on the uniformity of American speech & were impressed by its proper grammatical use as well. There’s a quote from a Scottish Lord who travelled through the colonies during the mid 18th century saying, “the propriety of Language here suprized me much, the English tongue being spoken by all ranks, in a degree of purity and perfection, surpassing any, but the polite part of London”

So, I think the Englishman would only be surprised by her ‘grating accent’ if he actually came from Northern England or somewhere else where there’s a strong regional accent.

Sorry for the lecture, I’m especially interested in linguistics & historical changes in language usage. :)

Also a question for Nathalie: Is petit chou in general use still? I always have a giggle when a character says that!

In one of the Bedwyn books, the hero, who is bilingual due to having an English father and a French mother, was born and raised in England, then exiled to France sometime after his majority.  Balogh thinks that this background somehow means he should have a French accent when he speaks English.  That is simply incorrect; he should speak English with an English accent, because 1) children get their accents from their peers, not their parents; 2) his governess would make sure that he has a proper upper-class accent anyway; and 3) when living in France, he would no doubt speak French with the French and English with the English, thereby avoiding somehow magically picking up a French accent when speaking English.  Sorry, monsieur, no charming French accent for you.  Drove me crazy throughout the entire book, which wasn’t half bad otherwise.

My pet peeve works for historical as well as contemporary.  As already noted above, most writers have little or no knowledge of fabrics. I get cranky trying to visualize these mucked-up scenes. Among other mistakes, most use silk and satin as interchangable terms...so not true. 

LKH frequently writes about sliding off slippery silk sheets.  Silly rabbit, silk sheets are not slippery. She probably means satin sheets (which are usually woven from nylon which is slippery, and feel like sleeping in saran wrap).  SILK IS A FIBER, SATIN IS A WEAVE. 

Silk, cotton, rayon, polyester, nylon, wool, spandex, acetate, tencel, etc. are “fibers”. Corduroy, satin, jacquard, twill, denim, knits, velvet, etc. are “weaves”...the method used to turn the fibers into fabric.  For example, silk can be woven into regular fabric, knits, velvet, or even satin (most is nylon or acetate).

In it’s most common weave, silk looks alot like cotton.  In the last few years, silk knits are available commercially (if your favorite man doesn’t own a silk knit shirt, Christmas is just around the corner).  Silk satin and velvets are difficult to find, but beautiful.

In a historical setting, silk would be expensive and rare enough to be worn exclusively by the upper classes.  Shiny satin (as we know it today) did not exist until the invention of man made fibers.

Getting off my soapbox now...don’t throw the poison tomatoes at me.

I’m going to point out a couple things doing my best not to sound like a know-it-all, but I’ll probably fail. So let me explain first: I taught linguistics at the university level for twelve years, and my primary research area was variation and change. This does not mean that I know everything about this subject, but I can provide some perspective.

The most difficult thing about historical linguistics is the near impossibility of reconstructing (with any degree of certitude) how things were pronounced. It’s been hundreds of years since there was anything even approaching a sound=letter equivalency. Spelling wasn’t fully standardized until the 19th century. You probably have heard that Shakespeare signed his name five or seven or ten different ways.

If nobody agrees on how to spell things, and if there are dozens of different varieties of English being spoken, you can see the difficulty in really knowing how Shakespeare spoke. What we do know comes from painstaking analysis of rhyme schemes and current day dialects. And even there, scholars argue.

The other big thing to remember is that people are notoriously unreliable when it comes to passing on information about language spoken around them. To say ‘I was surprised at how well the Americans spoke when I visited there’ could mean a hundred different things. And on top of that, the term ‘grammatical’ is used in very different ways by different people.

So when you read little snippets in the paper ‘academics claim small town in lower Spodunk county still speaking Shakespearean English!’ you should remember this is a lot like the ads that claim ‘three out of four doctors agree’.

All this stuff got a lot easier once the technology for recording voice came along. We can pretty much reconstruct Victorian English in all its varieties over space because people who spoke those versions of English lived into the 1940s and 50s, and linguists did try to get some data down for posterity.

Otherwise when I taught historical linguistics, the advice I give is this: come up with a scheme for the way you’re going to use language and dialect and variation, base it as far as you are able in documented studies, and be consistent.

That’s the most you can hope for.

Things I got all Uppity about and then . .. .

okay turns out to have been used much earlier than I expected. I can’t recall when. I could look it up but I’m too lazy to pull out the huge old OED for it. Rosina?

I frequently get all hot under the collar about a word, pull out the OED and find out the word was first IN PRINT about the time of the book’s setting.

I think once a word hits print, the words has been kicking around in the language for at least a few years--particularly in previous centuries. (Rosina, again?)

I’m guessing language changed more gradually in the days of slower travel. Oh, and obviously I’m talking about words other than examples like Mrs. Malaprop(ism) or Rev Spooner(ism).

I’m guessing that English accents were far more regional, even among the aristocracy and gentry, than we think in historic times. Walter Raleigh kept his west country accent all his life, apparently. Or at least, the aristos might speak one way among themselves but lapse into their own dialect back home on the estate. The idea of “proper” English is one that was encouraged by the BBC, altho the posh and aristocratic do have their own strange accent--the Queen, for instance, pronounces “off” as “aawf.”
It’s a fascinating topic. That Wikipedia page is awesome--voiced velars! voiceless fricatives!

I’ve been trying to figure out how to work “voiceless fricatives” into an insult.

Yah, you’re nothing but a unholy voiceless fractive.

Maybe it works best as a muttered curse. “flippin fricative”

kate r --

that’s an excellent point, and you’re exactly right.

The OED is a fantastic resource but you have to remember one crucial thing: the farther back in time you go, the fewer written and/or printed documents exist, and they become primarily (1) religious or (2) legal in nature. So maybe the OED tells us that the word XXX was first recorded in written language in the year 1400, but what does that mean? It was formal enough to make its way into a sermon. The OED can’t tell us about the words that were being used by women when they got to talking in front of the hearth, or the conversations between father and child, or fishmonger and butcher, or field worker and overseer.

So that means the farther back in time you go, the less representative the OED becomes.

When I was studying Old High German in grad school, all the texts were religious (sermons, bible translations) but there was a smattering of other stuff. Incantations, recipes, travel notes. My very favorite thing was a short list some merchant had put together for himself, phrases in (what was then) French. Things like, ‘how much does that cost’ and ‘this is my horse’ and my favorite: ‘is that your woman?’

That one small document gave me a sense of the time and place as nothing else could.

I guess the bottom line is, you can’t assume very much about the languages spoken in the past. You can make informed guesses, and that’s about it.

In case you were wondering:

Das ist min ross. (That is my horse)

Ist das din wib? (Is that your woman?)

Which gives you a total of six (6!) voiceless fricatives.

Bron,

I think I just finished the same one, and if she was working as a designer...There was (and still is!) a major difference in the payscale between designers who work with the customers and the seamstresses in the back, and esp. the seamstresses things are sent out to. And some people probably did prefer being designers..in general, my experience says those that make it are an independant lot, and love it even with the enormous time commitment.

So maybe the OED tells us that the word XXX was first recorded in written language in the year 1400, but what does that mean? It was formal enough to make its way into a sermon.

Oh no, no, no! Middle English lit comprises much more than only sermons! Think of Chaucer! And he even used naughty words. :)

When I was studying Old High German in grad school, all the texts were religious (sermons, bible translations) but there was a smattering of other stuff. Incantations, recipes, travel notes.

Then they definitely left out the good bits like the Hildebrandslied. Fie on them!

I stand corrected, I should have gone earlier. Pre-Chaucer, at any rate.

Oh, Rosina, I’ve just found out you’re Sara Donati—how exciting! *major lightbulb moment here* :)

Yup, that’s me.

“Granted, Shakespearean England probably isn’t as attractive as it could be to writers of time-travel romances, possibly because of all the plague.”

Just finished writing a partially time-travel erotic (yes, erotic) romance in which the Great Mortality of the mid-fourteenth century figures prominently.  I absolutely lost myself in the research--didn’t want it to end--because the period was so fascinating.  Why writers keep gravitating toward the Regency and Victorian periods is beyond me.  What’s the big freakin’ deal?

Americanisms would throw me off - a governess walking ‘two blocks’, or an English Lord asking for his ‘pants’. There’s a Julia Quinn book which begins with the heroine worrying that her younger brother isn’t going to graduate from Eton. It was such an odd use of the word that I spent the next chapter or two wondering if she was right, and the upper classes had used ‘graduate’ that way. Never checked it out.
Partly because Quinn can be a bit haphazard about British stuff, I was darkly suspicious of her use of the Royal Mail in the Regency - I’d a firm idea in my head that that was a Victorian idea - Penny Black & all that. I did actually check that, and she was right.

“Americanisms would throw me off - a governess walking ‘two blocks’”

That doesn’t sound like an Americanism to me. I was brought up somewhere in the UK where we had Georgian buildings, and we would walk or cycle ‘round the block’, because the buildings were in squares, with the front doors all facing outwards, and gardens at the back, so if you stayed on the pavement you could go all the way round, past all the front doors and come back to where you’d started.  I looked up the OED and it says that ‘block’ can mean:

“A compact or connected mass of houses or buildings, with no intervening spaces; (esp. in U.S. and Canada) the quadrangular mass of buildings included between four streets, or two ‘avenues’ and two streets at right angles to them.  b. A portion of a town or space of ground so bounded, whether occupied by buildings or not. orig. U.S.”

So a ‘block’ may have a different meaning in the US and Canada when referring to portions of town buildings, but we do have blocks in the UK. I’d imagine it’s not a word used so much in places where the town layout is different e.g. if there are long lines of terraced housing, or a jumble of medieval buildings.

I can only recall one I read that stuck in my mind as driving me up the wall and the book into the wall when I couldn’t get past page one.
Some Regency women had formed a “book club” as a facade for their feminist detective agency. This wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that they were “reading” a certain novel by “Miss Jane Austen” which wasn’t published until two or three years after the book took place, and when it was, wasn’t published under Austen’s own name, rather it was published anonymously as “a novel by a lady.”

I’m just enough of an Austen nerd to have that bug the shit out of me.

And the cover-art was completely off and didn’t look a think like the characters or their time-period (why hello Scarlett O’Hara! May I introduce your contemporary Lizzie Bennet?) but that certainly hasn’t been the first time nor will it be the last that a bad cover has been the icing on a bad, bad cake of fiction.

Laura - I’m in two minds about that. I’ve certainly heard the phrase -’round the block’ though probably mostly in the context ‘she’s been around the block a few times.’
And now I’m wondering where that phrase originates… Block of housing, butcher’s block, blockade? What block, and why does circumnavigating it leave you worldly wise?

Nonetheless, to get back to the point, I’d accept the word ‘block’ - it’s block as a measurement of distance that I’d quibble at. To me, half a mile, round the corner, hundred yards, would be natural ways of describing the distance between one place and another. I’ve not only never been told ‘it’s two blocks away’ but it wouldn’t convey anything to me if I was: I’ve no mental construct of how far a block might be.

The term always made sense to me as something that arose out of the nature of planned cities. I’d always read it as an Americanism - though I’ve been wrong about many things, and I’ve no specialist knowledge about this.

“Nonetheless, to get back to the point, I’d accept the word ‘block’ - it’s block as a measurement of distance that I’d quibble at.”

I agree, Marianne.  FWIW, the ‘round the block’ phrase originates from when borstals or the National Service between the ‘40s and the ‘70s were at its peak.

That is the answer given to a caller’s enquiry on a Radio 4 history programme a few years ago. IIRC, Sue Cook was a presenter at the time. Hm. Oh, I’ve just googled: it’s ‘Making History’(http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/making_history/index.shtml)

I can’t remember why it’s associated with borstals or the National Service. Maybe it’s something to do with those boys having to run round a field or such as a punishment? Hm, I think so because sometimes we say “You’re driving me round the block” or “I feel so tired that I feel I did a few runs round the block”. Maybe it evolved to what it means today: a short walking distance area between point A and point B, and it’s usually round a corner. 

For it to be used as a measurement of distance, e.g. ‘It’s two blocks away’, I’m with Marianne here - it’s an Americanism, IMO.

i was told growing up that 12 blocks was a mile. Grew up in a western canadian city.

I remember hearing a quote in a PBS documentary from an Englishman traveling in America a decade or so before the Revolution, something to the effect that New Englanders spoke English very well except for seeming nasal.  I suppose it wouldn’t be beyond the level of suspension of disbelief for somebody to find that nasality unpleasant.

Historical misfits I’ve seen?  Ancient Greeks celebrating Beltaine.  That’s the wrong set of European pagans.

1) children get their accents from their peers, not their parents

Umm. I don’t know. I was raised by Yankee parents in Mississippi, and I haven’t got a southern accent. I can put one on easily, and when I’m drunk or extremely tired I can sound very southern, but by and large, I’d say it’s not necessarily peers who set your accent. Parents with strong opinions about their children’s speech patterns and the temerity to withold cookies for a week just because said child let one “Don’t be hateful, now!” slip out can set your accent quite well. :-) If said character spent most of his formative years with his mother, she valued her own French upbringing and wanted her son to feel French as well, and his nanny wasn’t quite so watchful when he wasn’t in the nursery with her, his natural accent could have been French--because that’s how he learned to speak with his mother. My primary accent is what they call “Broadcast Midwestern” because I’ve been taught to be very careful with pronunciation. My peers in grade school would have laughed themselves sick to hear me speak as I do now!

Although I do spread my “I” out to “Ah” when I’m speaking very quickly. So I guess there’s some props to the theory there.

Think I’ve gone beyond my former state of incoherent historical rage and into quiet acceptance about the historicity in fiction issue. These days, I just pretend it’s set in an alternate universe. That’s not to say I don’t love a really well-written, well-researched piece of historical fiction. When I do find it, or at least a very good imitation, I bounce up and down like a fruitcake on a trampoline and investigate for potential purchase just about everything the author’s written.

But if the author plays to other strengths, that’s enough to sustain me. For me, it’s more important that a book is internally consistent. That’s not to say I won’t occasionally double-take or even let out a snotty, “Oh please” on occasion, and if the abused detail is critical to the plot then it might tip the balance in certain cases. But I won’t let it spoil an otherwise good book. Frankly, if a writer’s got that spark of magic then I’m not really thinking about the mechanics.

So much of history is unknown and uncertain. As the OED discussion in this thread shows, interpretation is often more about what’s probable, than what is actually confirmed truth. And someone’s bound to disprove this or re-evaluate the evidence at some point. At other times evidence can contradict received wisdom. This is where a good historical writer can really shine through. But given the other unlikely aspects of many romance novels, I’m not going to cavil at the odd slip-up.

All this goes with the caveat that no one talks about how “historically accurate” a book is. For that, I want footnotes and references dammit, and I will pick the nits out of that freshly-conditioned, unpowdered hair with a vengeance. Otherwise I treat oddities as signifiers. If velvet is used before velvet was invented, then I just use it as shorthand for “insert most luxurious fabric of the time here”.

For me, the problem is when historical sloppiness is reflected in general sloppiness. I take the whole as a lack of respect for me as a reader. So while I might not be bothered about a heroine skipping around in her medieval satin hot pants, it will be added to the pile featuring editing issues, silly accents, stereotyped characters and annoyingly precocious children wallowing in muddy plot holes until the weight of it all is overwhelming and I just give up and go watch something about mackerel migrations.

Added to this is the annoyance I feel when the same plots are endlessly recycled in the name of a historical reality that never existed.

I think good historical fiction is a kind of illusion. If I want good historical fact, I’ll read non-fiction. It may be a load of tripe too, since not all history is created equal, but at least I’ll get more satisfaction out of the argument.

Ummm… and since I’m on a roll this evening, about the dialect thing? I desperately want to dig out David Crystal on this, but he’s in storage. (y’know - linguist-in-a-cupboard - for all those tricky lexical situations). I do recall him arguing very covincingly that everyone in Britain had regional accents until the last century or two, when one dialect came to dominate as “standard” but can’t remember the details too well.

People’s opinion about a particular accent isn’t impartial - it’s based on a host of cultural associations and perceptions of others, as well as individual personalities. That’s where I might also raise an eyebrow at the description Sarah quoted, although it would be interesting to hear the context. I mean, “grating” is more judgemental than descriptive about the accent in question. “Grating accent” could be about the person being marked as not belonging to another culture because of their different speech patterns.

But no two people pronouce things exactly the same, and “accent” itself used to be used as a synonym for voice/speech rather than regional or other pronounciation (as in, “in accents low"). So it could just be a reflection of the view of an individual or their own idiosyncrasies. That’s how I might argue myself into a corner and just vote for the alternate universe.

Another thing that relates to this is that the Bennet sisters were more likely to have had Hampshire accents than the smooth RP vowels of most screen adaptations. But if Hampshire accents (and how would this be recreated anyhow, since speech and dialect change more rapidly than written language?) were used in the name of authenticity, it’s not possible to escape the fact that this accent likely has a very different set of cultural associations for modern listeners. 

So is it better to aim for the effect that JA was apparently intending, or go for what academics argue is the more authentic speech pattern? IMHO, there’s merit in both as long as people are aware that neither is or was reality, strictly speaking.

And where does this leave people whose accents change after suffering a brain injury?

I don’t know if others mentioned it before, but this all reminds me of the movie A Knight’s Tale. Some couldn’t believe the creators would “despoil” a perfectly good medieval movie with David Bowie music and modern themes. But the director had argued that folks during that time were just like us, that the language would’ve felt alive and truncated in all kinds of little bits and been wildly different from one person to the next. It made sense to me and not that I want to excuse lazy authors who won’t bother with some obvious details, I still think a good story will save the day even if some of the historical bits make me go “Rhuh?”

Plus, who the hell knows how folks *really* talked and behaved during, say, the Middle Ages. I prefer to read a good story with goofed-up historical details than a bad story with incredibly researched history. *makes me wanna yawn already*

EvilAuntiePeril: And where does this leave people whose accents change after suffering a brain injury?

Or someone like Madonna, whose accent has spontaneously ... evolved ... over time?

I read a historical where the character said, “Whatever.” As in dad says, “You will marry this person.” Daughter responds, “Whatever.” That’s the only one I’m coming up with right now.

First: did you know that if you mistype the word in the box, you are punished? Your whole carefully composed comment is destroyed.

So once again, briefly this time:

Rather than be rude and hijack this already very interesting discussion with my usual stuff on accent, I’ve done that on my weblog, today’s entry.

Parents with strong opinions about their children’s speech patterns and the temerity to withold cookies for a week just because said child let one “Don’t be hateful, now!” slip out can set your accent quite well.

I hear you Kaite. I grew up in Boston with two parents who essentially have that bland “midland” accent. We were NOT allowed to have brawd Bahstin accents. No seh, feh sure.

And “Wicked!” as in “Wicked Awesome!” was considered a swear word of the highest rank.

Funny now to hear them say how much they enjoyed Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon et al., in “The Departed”.

But, Ma!

My head hurts too much to even think about it.  But I imagine the Brits have always complained about the way Americans use their language...if only because it gave them something to do.

Actually during my research into England(am planning on studying/working abroad), an American accent is admired by the English because it denotes prosperity and wealth--of all things!

an American accent is admired by the English because it denotes prosperity and wealth--of all things!

Shay, was this research you conducted yourself? I wouldn’t want to suggest that English people don’t associate American accents with wealth, but I wonder whether, if you carried out the research, and you have an American accent, the respondents might, out of politeness, not mention any negative connotations that an American accent has for them?

The associations with wealth are quite understandable, since we are probably most likely to see Americans in the context of popular music (e.g. Madonna, Britney Spears), TV/film (e.g. Dallas, Sex and the City), politics (e.g. George Bush) and business (e.g. Bill Gates, Donald Trump). When Americans are tourists they’ve got leisure time and are spending money, which may lead people to assume that they’re rich.

Laura V. wrote: “When Americans are tourists they’ve got leisure time and are spending money, which may lead people to assume that they’re rich.”

My own experience has been this: When I browse silently in English antique shops, dealers go on chatting with their chums or reading the newspaper. But once they’ve heard me speak—in my nasal American tones—they hurry from around the counter & make a concerted effort to sell me everything in the shop. I think I’d do much better on prices if I pretended to be a deaf-mute & let my British companions do all the talking for me. (I believe there’s a good living to be made from American tourists.)

Also, I discovered repeatedly that, if you don’t have a southern drawl, or sound as if you grew up in the New York outer boroughs, or if you don’t use any slang favored by California teenagers, then the British will pay you the great ccompliment of saying: “You sounded rather like a Canadian. I thought at first you might be from Canada.”

Oddly, if you have an accent like mine (or most of my peers - count me as someone who doesn’t have an accent like either parent), which is standard middle-class English with a vague regional twang, then some Canadians and Americans assume I’m from New Zealand or Ireland. No one tries to sell me antiques, though, just shoes, CDs and clothes at cost.

Also, brain being what it is, in a previous comment I wrote “plot”. This is because I’m an idiot. I really meant recycled plot devices/stereotypes.

I took a quiz that told me I have no accent at all and that I’d make a good news presenter.

My husband is English and has lived in the Midwest for nine years. Last month, a woman asked him whether he was from NZ or Australia because “she’d lived in England for a while amongst Kiwis.” Apparently she’d spent more time with the Kiwis than with the natives. Or else the Midwest has done seriously unnatural things to his accent.  Time to take him home for a recharge.

When I lived in England for a year, I intentionally softened my nasal twang because I hated being pegged for an American. People did treat me differently—more casually—when they assumed I was English. Sometimes I just wanted to buy bread and not have to go into how I was an exchange student yada yada. And luckily, I am not Madonna so no one except my mom really noticed the change. By the time Keven and I were engaged, his extended family did not believe I was American—especially, they said, because I have imperfect teeth and I’m not particularly loud.

I softened my accent on purpose when I was an exchange student in the British Isles too!! Well, half on purpose-- I’m such an accent sponge I can’t avoid adopting bits of people’s accents. You should’ve heard me during my sister’s wedding to a Mississippi boy-- I couldn’t stop saying “y’all.”
But I did soften some of the really harsh American vowels on purpose, in situations like bars, where I just didn’t want to attract attention and just wanted to be one of the group.

But whenever I phoned home my mom would spend the first minute and a half laughing at my accent.

However, unlike some people I know, I didn’t artificially hang onto the modified accent once I came home, like having spent ten months in the British Isles was going to make me pseudo-British for life… Although I still go a bit British when I’m really drunk and obstreporous.

At the moment I have trouble not having a Canadian accent because I work at an airport right near the border and most of my customers are Canadians. Ticky-boo, eh? Soh-rry aboot that!

I think the upshot of this thread is that most of the more subtle historical accuracy stuff is what you make of it. I’m writing a historical at the moment and I’m mostly trying to focus on not throwing anything in there that’s not going to help the story. There’s a tendency toward unevenness-- talking too much about things I’ve researched, and glossing over things I haven’t.

I’ve seen extant examples of velvet dating back to the 16th century (both cut and uncut), in a variety of fibers (wool, silk, linen). And by then there was a thriving silk industry in Italy which was producing various qualities of silk (which would still have been for wealthy merchants on up, but it wasn’t like only nobles could afford silk).

I’m with you on the stupidity of a silk chemise (hello, the whole point of a chemise is that it’s easily laundered, which we all know silk isn’t; esp when combined with the caustic soap used in by the laundresses of the past). And pretty much ALL heroines from the Tudor era through the Edwardian era (INCLUDING those of the Regency) should be wearing their pair of bodies, stays, or corset.

I despise people who assume that I’m an inbred hillbilly just because I use “y’all” and draw out my vowels.  I’ve never had anyone say specifically that they hate my accent, but I have been treated differently by people, including my own family members from the northeast.

For the most part, people think that it can be “charming” and there are times when it really and truly is better to be underestimated. 

The one thing that I discovered in my 20s (I hadn’t left the south since I hit puberty) is that men LOVE my accent.  Particularly the men from overseas.  Throw a “sugar” and a “baby” in the conversation and I could have anything that I wanted.  I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I was calling them that because I couldn’t remember their names.

At the same time, I discovered that I absolutely can NOT understand an Irish accent no matter how hard I try.  I feel like an absolute fool, and I have a hard time admitting that I can’t understand the same damn language that I tend to butcher in new and exciting ways everyday.  I don’t find the accent offensive or anything, I just can’t understand their inflections.

I discovered that I absolutely can NOT understand an Irish accent no matter how hard I try.

I’m always amazed by this, but it’s not uncommon. I recently attended a workshop given by a German woman who speaks VERY clear English with a lovely English accent. No less than three people out of the twenty attendees said afterwards they couldn’t understand a word she said! And when I attended college in VA (note I’m from CA) tons of people had trouble understanding me.

You’re dead right about the Southern accent getting men to do what you want. LOL! If I tell a guy, “I’m sorry, but you can’t stand there, you’re blocking the cocktail waitresses.” He’ll get mad. But if I put on the Georgia drawl I learned from my friends in college and say the same thing he’ll trip over himself to move.

At the same time, I discovered that I absolutely can NOT understand an Irish accent no matter how hard I try.

Try this one on for a picky linguistic center: I can’t understand a Liverpool accent. Paul McCartney is about the outer limits of my understanding, and he’s pretty much BBC standard anymore. George Harrison? Only when he was singing. When I lived in London, my lands were a very nice guy from Liverpool and his Irish wife. If I needed something, I had to ask her because I always got a headache when he spoke--I just couldn’t understand him at all. I swear, it didn’t even sound like English!

Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t putting me on or something. Although why would he? And I’ve worked for a Taiwanese professor whose friends (mostly mainland Chinese) couldn’t speak but two words of English and I understood them fine! So what up with that?

The saddest part of that whole trip was my American Studies prof--he was just so studly I (and probably the other females in that class; hmm, it was largely female) wanted to throw him down behind his desk and do unmentionable things to his delicious person. He sounded exactly, EXACTLY like Scrooge McDuck. I think I’m emotionally scarred for life!  :lol:

Laura:  To us, cajones are really big boxes. :-)

I speak English with a Cuban/Miami accent, although at some point I must have lost the Cuban part ‘cause one of my professors thought I’d been born in Miami.  Now I live in Alabama, where some of the y’alls and the drawl have started to stick, and the Cuban accent has returned.

I also speak a little bit of Russian, so sometimes there are three different languages and three/four inflections trying to come out.  When that happens I have to compose the entire sentence in my head and then hope it comes out ok.

About children learning accents, etc from their parents:  When I lived in Spain one summer there was this guy who surprised the heck out of me when he switched from Castilian Spanish to Aussie-accented English.  It turns out his dad was Australian, and he’d been the one who practiced English with him.  They learned English in school, and the other students’ was Spanish accented.

Maia

Maia, my Spanish is Castilian Spanish, which probably accounts for why I’d think of ‘cajones’ as having a different meaning. When I was at university I came across varieties of Latin American Spanish for the first time, and sometimes it was very different from what I was used to (and, of course, it varied depending on which part of Latin America the texts came from). The verb ‘coger’ has a whole different meaning in Argentina, for example. Is it rude in other parts of Latin America too?

I discovered that I absolutely can NOT understand an Irish accent no matter how hard I try.

OMG, this brings back memories! Eight months in Ireland and half of the time I couldn’t tell whether the people were talking English or Irish! One day I met this boy outside our student accomodation and (I swear!) he asked me “Howdediddledoo?” Poor guy, after the third repitition he got a bit cranky ... (But I still didn’t have the foggiest clue what he was saying.)

I recently attended a workshop given by a German woman who speaks VERY clear English with a lovely English accent. No less than three people out of the twenty attendees said afterwards they couldn’t understand a word she said!

As long as they didn’t interrupt the workshop every 10 minutes with shouts of “WHAT did you say??? Your English is sooo strange!”

Maybe I find Irish accents easy cause I live in San Francisco and the streets (and bars!) are lousy with Irishmen (in a good way *wink*).

I think the only accent that ever stumped me was Glaswegian, and my friends from Edinburgh assured me that they can’t understand Glaswegians half the time either. LOL! And it was just one guy, I could understand all his friends.

I’m English, from the UK, never lived anywhere else. My accent is North-West, Lancashire, but I can talk posh if I need to - most people here can. Tony Blair has an “Estuary” accent, to give you an idea.
Having posted my credentials, there is one word that tells everyone outside the US that the historical novel is written by an American.
They are commonly known as “gotten books,” because ‘gotten’ is the word. I’ve got into long and boring discussions with people who refuse to believe it, but it’s true. After the 16th century, “gotten” was used rarely, if at all. A book peppered with them tends to scream “American.”
But that won’t stop me reading a good book. When I start to get bored with a book, I start looking for the reasons why. Gobs of backstory, stereotypical characters, unbelievable plots and lack of attention to historical detail will all do it. As will all that “telling not showing.”
So it’s a combination of things.

gotten

Can you use that in a sentence?

Do you mean “He’d gotten the book from her.” rather than “He’d received the book from her.”? *shudder* That use makes this American queasy. Do you see this a lot?

“gotten

Can you use that in a sentence?

Do you mean “He’d gotten the book from her.” rather than “He’d received the book from her.”? *shudder* That use makes this American queasy. Do you see this a lot? “

No, you’d say “He got the book from her.” Or avoid the word altogether, and say, “He had the book from her” or something a bit nicer. Try to make it work on both sides of the Atlantic!
Sorry, my editor is slapping my wrist for using “had” too much, so I’m getting rid of them whenever I can.

I know this doesn’t apply to language but it was very annoying all the same.

I recently read a story where the heroine was in Las Vegas IN JULY and bought a velvet dress for a night out on the town.

I was there this past July and it was 112 degrees!

Ah, crimes of fashion . . . how many films have we all seen where characters are supposedly running about San Francisco but are dressed for a day in LA? Too many. When I see the girl in the tank top and shorts I shake my head and grin over how sorry she’d really be come 5pm when the fog rolls in.

Two words in historicals that make me think, but are usually correct: electric and plastic!