speaking timeless and other problems
Sep. 18th, 2013 04:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliHow to convey that these are not the fields we know. . . it helps to use an attempt at timeless English, in both narration and dialog. Nothing Chaucer would recognize, of course. But something Jane Austen could read with clarity. Ideally something Shakespeare could read without issues.
Reading English literature back from the present day can give enough of a feel for it. I found that reading backwards through history meant that I didn't have to look up any of the words when I hit Shakespeare; I had picked up enough that the few left I could pick up the usual way. And I had to look up only a few when I read Malory ("orgulous" means "proud, haughty.")
However, then you need to keep applying the modernometer to judge the words. You don't fire arrows unless you have firearms that actually are fired. No one uses "Hello" as a greeting until the telephone, unless shouting from mountain to mountain (though it is an exclamation of surprise -- I wonder if you can get away with, "Hello, hello, hello, what have we here?") And to avoid the stamp of "speaking forthsoothly" one wishes to avoid any archaic expressions unless the only alternatives have the stamp of modernity.
To be sure, sometimes there are issues. One character exclaims in a scene, "I'm an idiot," and the writer pauses, pondering. Idiot. Is that modern? Fool is old, and might work, but do I have to forgo "idiot"? When did it come into use anyway?
Reading English literature back from the present day can give enough of a feel for it. I found that reading backwards through history meant that I didn't have to look up any of the words when I hit Shakespeare; I had picked up enough that the few left I could pick up the usual way. And I had to look up only a few when I read Malory ("orgulous" means "proud, haughty.")
However, then you need to keep applying the modernometer to judge the words. You don't fire arrows unless you have firearms that actually are fired. No one uses "Hello" as a greeting until the telephone, unless shouting from mountain to mountain (though it is an exclamation of surprise -- I wonder if you can get away with, "Hello, hello, hello, what have we here?") And to avoid the stamp of "speaking forthsoothly" one wishes to avoid any archaic expressions unless the only alternatives have the stamp of modernity.
To be sure, sometimes there are issues. One character exclaims in a scene, "I'm an idiot," and the writer pauses, pondering. Idiot. Is that modern? Fool is old, and might work, but do I have to forgo "idiot"? When did it come into use anyway?
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Date: 2013-09-18 09:33 pm (UTC)Lewis's STUDIES IN WORDS with his warning against 'dangerous sense'. Might he say that Shakespeare's 'told by an idiot' isn't really a precedent for our 'I'm an idiot'?
We might add shock absorber against jarring, by using only a less modern rhythm when calling onself an idiot.
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Date: 2013-09-18 10:06 pm (UTC)It wasn't the phrasing that bugged me. It was the way I could not put my thumb on the oldness of the term "idiot." And I knew that some of the terms are quite modern. "Moron" for instance, is right out -- it was invented in the 20th century when trying to get more precise terms for a lack of intelligence.
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Date: 2013-09-18 11:29 pm (UTC)As best I can tell from novels, it started to be used as a racy sort of greeting in mid-century, and had drifted enough into use to be available for popularisation with the telephone. It's used in Vanity Fair (as a greeting, indoors) by one slangy, fast (unlikeable) young man to another, and then later, just pre-telephone in Louisa May Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Girl as a greeting, indoors, by a blundering but sympathetic young man to a young woman (he is abashed at being so slangy; she is amused but not surprised).
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