Historical Usage Fail
Jul. 31st, 2009 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akirluOkay, 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.
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.
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Date: 2009-08-01 09:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-01 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-02 12:57 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2009-08-03 05:24 pm (UTC)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.