Historical Usage Fail

[akirlu]

Okay, so I am slogging through C.C. Finlay's The Patriot Witch.

The use of entirely contemporary locutions for dialog that is supposed to be set in 1776 Massachusetts has been bothering me throughout, but Finlay does mostly okay whenever his main character can stop flopping around on the deck about how he's let various others down and must set it all right for long enough to actually do something. The action sequences are reasonably engaging. The zombies were a nice touch.

Except. Except now we're on the patriot lines above the siege of Boston, and two officers are conferring. The officer commanding the local troops offers to cede command to a more senior visiting officer. The more senior officer declines. The commanding officer says, and I quote, "There is no ego involved. I would be honored to pass the command to you."

No ego involved? No frickin' EGO? Mega FAIL. "Ego" in the sense of self-esteem, pride, or self-importance, is an entirely modern usage. OED dates it to 1891 at the earliest, and I would bet it didn't hit the common coin until well after 1900, and the rising star of Sigmund Freud. But in any event, it post-dates 1776 by well over a bloody century.

Oh, I don't know why I'm surprised. A few dozen pages earlier, we had a smuggler speak of women as "the fair gender". Sigh. As a euphemism for the sex of a human being, the earliest citation the OED can find for gender is 1963. Or close to 200 years later than the book.

While earlier still we have an 18th century farmer using the construction "not so much" as a particle to negate a whole sentence, and an 18th century teenage female using the word "hot" to describe an man's attractiveness. 21st century usage, anyone?

Does anyone actually copy edit over at Del Rey? Not so much.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I was amazed people were recommending this series to me, because I ran into the language problem just flipping through it in the store. I cannot stand anachronisms in historical fiction. I'm glad someone else noticed.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Probably not going to be the series for you, then. There's a point at which a female character is posing as a boy, and there is a lot of fumfiddling about because she and the VP character feel compelled to cut her hair short, and stuff it under a cap to hide the fact that she's a woman. Yeah, because no men wore their hair shoulder-length or longer in 1776. This is why the founders are often mistaken for a bunch of 1950s bankers.

Or there's the bit where the VP character runs to the barn to get oil enough to soak a couple of corpses and burn them up. And I'm left wondering why an 18th century farm would be keeping large quantities of oil in the barn, and what kind of oil that would be, exactly? Lamp oil? Surely that would be kept mostly at or near the house? Oil for keeping iron tools from rusting? Possibly, but there wouldn't be enough of that to soak two piles of dead meat sufficiently that they would burn unaided.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I'm as yet undecided whether I will go on and read the other two books. There's a certain amount of promise in the action, but if the subsequent books in the trilogy go on much as the first, I don't know if I can face it.

[seawasp]

Is it actually supposed to be historical fiction, or adventure fiction in a superficially historical setting? Most writing "in the past" uses mostly-modern phrasing with occasional historical events, phrasing, or habits for stage-setting. For some this is laziness, for some it's ignorance, and for some it's a deliberate choice to maximize the work's accessibility.

If they're touting the historical versimilitude of the work, then that's failure, yes. But copy-editors aren't generally going to be going over THAT kind of thing unless they've been specifically instructed to look for anachronisms.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

But copy-editors aren't generally going to be going over THAT kind of thing unless they've been specifically instructed to look for anachronisms.

Indeed. My own experience is that if the copy editor points out this kind of thing but was not instructed to look for it, the copy editor will be chastised and perhaps not hired again.

[kateyule.livejournal.com]

How to have a book that hasn't been copy edited, even when you've hired a copy editor! Whee.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Well, in fairness, even when I copyedit scholarly books for university presses, there's often something I'm told to overlook for this or that reason. There's always still plenty of work to do!

[seawasp]

Not really. Especially -- let me emphasize that -- especially in SF/F/etc., where the author is free to change the world in little ways and large ways. It's the author's job to point out areas where you CAN and where you CAN'T meddle with their text.

Looked at another way, this is a universe where MAGIC WORKS. And yet we're supposed to swallow that SO MUCH is COMPLETELY UNCHANGED from our own history??

That's far, far, FAR (add "far x 10") more difficult to believe than that there might be some phrases in use in that world which in OUR world didn't become common coin until a couple hundred years later.

Look at all the alt-hist novels that are predicated on just ONE small change. Then try to convince me that having real, working magic dumped into things wouldn't end up creating a world a few hundred years later that WASN'T completely and utterly different from the one I know. You'd better work hard at convincing me, because I can't see any way you can do that, short of invoking some kind of "destiny" force in the universe.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

this is a universe where MAGIC WORKS. And yet we're supposed to swallow that SO MUCH is COMPLETELY UNCHANGED from our own history?

Yes, obviously, because that's the foundational premise of the book(s). Finlay is writing what is pretty clearly a "secret history" type fantasy. (The master of this type of fantasy is Tim Powers in, for instance, The Stress of Her Regard. Though Finlay is no Powers, alas.) The idea is that Finlay's world is our world, and unbeknown to us, magical events took place in the background, and certain pivotal events happened the way they did because of an underlying magical struggle. So of course it would be completely unchanged from our own history -- it is our history. One may cavil about how well this was done, or, as Paul Kincaid does, find that the magical explanation rather diminishes the glory of the various American victories, but supposing that we're dealing with a different world doesn't actually accord with the premises of the story.

I read that thing

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

and made it all the way through, barely. I really don't know why I kept reading, except that it was a free PDF. I have no desire to read the rest of the series. I agree with you about the bad linguistic construction.

It annoyed me as much as the time that I found a lady stirring up some cocoa for a visitor in 1740 Salem, MA in another historical novel.

[greyorm.livejournal.com]

I've never much minded certain anachronisms in historical works, unless the historical work in question is supposed to be absolutely accurate in every detail (in which case I probably wouldn't be reading it).

But I don't want to slog through language I need a translator or new college courses just to understand the meaning of, that I need to stop and consider for a while to tease out the meaning when I'm reading for pleasure, or to even understand that there IS an issue with the language (the only one of the above I likely would have noticed and been annoyed by would have been "hot").

Like when Costner's "Robin Hood" came out and some people threw a fit because the characters weren't speaking the period's English (an English which would have been unintelligible to modern audiences anyways). There's a point at which you have to say "I'm trying to evoke a feeling and make a point, not paint meaningless details accurately" and one must also consider the intended purpose and audience.

I don't think Finlay's works qualify as intending to be historical fiction -- I'd think pseudo-historical adventure fiction.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I'd think "pseudo-historical adventure fiction" is a marketing department invention for excusing sloppy editorial and writing practices.

I don't recall anyone "throwing a fit" because the English in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves wasn't period. What I recall is people snickering because Costner's accent is so egregiously American, and clashed with that of virtually everyone else in the cast. Rumors at the time were that the director saw it as a problem too and had tried shooting with Costner doing an 'English' accent. Only Costner's English accent was so spectacularly godawful that in the end they elected to skip it and just go with the clash.

And while I doubt very much that you would need either a translator or additional training to read late 18th C. prose -- it's still perfectly sensible to a contemporary reader -- I wasn't actually suggesting that the novel needed to be written in an 18th C. style, or even the dialog needed to be. Merely that obviously, jarringly later language could be left out. There's still plenty of English that is substantially unchanged over the intervening centuries.

One person's "meaningless detail" is another's war stopper. If you elect to cater to the audience that whines because the language in a book isn't immediately recognizable as the same patois they use when chillaxin' wit' dey buds, chances are you'll alienate a different reading segment. The mark of a good writer is the ability to strike a balance between the two.

[greyorm.livejournal.com]

I recall the moaning about RHPoT's linguistics pretty well, there were a couple of newspaper articles about it locally, and I definitely recall the accent kerfluffle (which also didn't bother me one bit).

Anyways, exactly. I think I'm a pretty standard reader, and like I said, I wouldn't have even noticed the linguistic bits you did, with the exception of the one noted.

I've found our own knowledge and expectations often get in the way of our enjoyment, or we think, "Oh STUPID! Come on, EVERYONE knows that doesn't belong/work that way!" When in fact, unless a person has had some education in the field in question, chances are everyone does not know any such thing and won't even blink (writers and copy-editors included).

For example, you know how many movies and TV shows have computers that work in pretty-much magical ways? I had to learn to ignore that--tell myself "different universe" or "doesn't matter"--and stop nit-picking and bitching in order to enjoy those stories and accept them on their own terms.

I think that's generally a lost skill among readers and critics today.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't think ignorance is a lost skill at all. Nor do I believe, absent actual citations, that any newspaper criticized Prince of Thieves for not being in Chaucerian English.

To each their own. As I say, if you cater to one segment, you may lose another.

[greyorm.livejournal.com]

Right. Ignorance. That's completely what I was talking about, and not, say, the way modern society puts snark and negative criticism up on a pedestal because we think it makes us sound so "smart(er than them)", and has completely abandoned flexibility of narrative imagination and the ability to take responsibility for suspending our own disbelief, to the point we can't even read dated science fiction stories because "they got it wrong!" and instead choose to sneer and laugh at them, so proving the immensity of our intellectual and imaginative fallibility. Or, you know, something along those lines.

As to citations, I apologize but I don't actually keep twenty-year-old newspapers lying around in order to quote from them. You'll have to take my word for it and use your knowledge of the numerous incredibly stupid things that are regularly printed in American newspapers as backup for the claim. And if not, oh well, it was an example, not the argument.