Reading Fiction: A Moment of Arrgh!

[akirlu]

Okay. Say your story is set in London in the early 19th century, and you've established that a group of characters are poor. They're a guild of servant-class laborers who collectively have not had work in months. And they were never well paid or prosperous to begin with. And now, because of public antipathy, these guys have been stuck in their guild hall for weeks for fear of getting beaten up whenever they go out. They are understandably sick of this circumstance, and so they've been whipped into a frenzy and they are going to go out and march on Parliament, and so they rush out into the yard of the guild hall, and some of them have horses so they get on them, and...

And no. No they don't. None of them have horses. These guys were poor to begin with, did not use horses to make their living, and hadn't been able to earn any money for ages and were too proud to accept charity from their few allies. Horses, famously, eat their heads off, whether in use or not. Even if these fellows were hauliers or some such, they couldn't possibly afford to stable and feed animals who weren't earning their keep. No one without significant wealth could afford to keep idle horses. Horses and carriages, especially in town, were the purview of people of pretty serious means. People of moderate means used hired hacks and carriages, and people of little means used their feet. And you can't even say the guild members might plausibly have borrowed the horses from carters or the nearest leasing stables because they had been trapped in their guild hall for weeks because virtually everyone had turned against them, and beat them to a pulp whenever they stuck their noses out.

So no. No horses. Also: no one in the early 19th century described soliciting an opinion as "input."

And so I say: arrrgh.

Comments

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

Arrrgh indeed! I read a lot of historical mysteries so I have experience with this type of arrrgh.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Obviously they contacted their friends via email.

[bedii.livejournal.com]

There's a wonderful swashbuckler set in the late 1700's where the captain calls a scam they'll be running a caper. Twice. That's when I have to go get popcorn, else my blood pressure blow the top of my head off.

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

Some people simply don't have an ear for period-appropriate language, and that's all there is to it. And then there are the people like us, for whom a word from the wrong period is as jarring as a houppelande with a zipper down the back.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Oh dear oh dear oh dearie dear.

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

"Lifestyle" and "relationship" are two of the ones that will set me off. ("Lifestyle", in particular, if the character in question is at all educated, will have me muttering, "What on earth is wrong with modus vivendi, huh?")

Also the phrase "be there for him/her/[insert noun or pronoun here]."

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Servants wouldn't have been hanging out in a guild hall either. Guild halls are for wealthy merchant types.

[replyhazy.livejournal.com]

nope.