I have a bit of a thing about anachronistic dialogue in dramas set within living memory. Recently it’s the flashbacks to 1996 in Undercover (BBC 1) which have been exercising me.
The week before last a newspaper hack had a right old rant about the ubiquity of the word ‘iconic’, which I’m pretty sure only did become ubiquitous well into the noughties. In Sunday’s episode, there was a whole riff, key to the action, on the expression ‘tipping point’, which again I would hazard didn’t come into popular parlance until some time after 2000.
So does this matter? On the ‘no’ side, I suppose here it could be argued that 1996 is being looked at through a 2016 lens, and the use of 2016 language makes it easier for modern folks to relate to the characters. On the ‘yes’ side, why shouldn’t language (the writer’s medium, after all) be subject to the same rules as, say, fashion or music in drama – it would be ridiculous to have a character listening to Coldplay or wearing carrot jeans in 1996, for example.
Yes, on reflection I probably *should* get out more. In the meantime, any thoughts (either on rightness or wrongness or your own meticulously harvested examples of anachronistic dialogue)?
Achilles: The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal. Because any moment might be our last. Everything’s more beautiful because we’re doomed.
From Troy
Not only did people talk like that then. I’m not sure they ever have. Or will.
Edit:
Not only did people NOT talk like that then. I’m not sure they ever have. Or ever will.
To quote Harrison Ford: You can write that shit but you can’t SAY it
There’s a line in ‘Zulu’ quite early on when the Afrikaner farmer warns Michael Caine & Stanley Baker of the impending cataclysm.
When the redcoats dismiss him & insist the British Army cannot be beaten by ‘savages’, he retorts ( paraphrasing) ‘ that’s just your Ego talking but your Ego won’t help you…’
It’s such a clunker that even an ignoramus like me was sure that ‘ego’ wasn’t common parlance at the time of Rorke’s Drift, & even the term had been coined it wouldn’t have been heard on the Veldt. Whenever I catch the film, it undermines the rest of the drama for me as the suspension of disbelief evaporates.
No meticulous harvest I’m afraid. But you’re absolutely right. Just as with clothes, music furniture etc, there should be someone doing their best to ensure that no language anachronisms slip through.
Not that it’s so easy. Etymologists can have long discussions when word entered the language or was past it’s Sell-By date.
I love humour which uses deliberate anachronisms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwNQf08Kxsw
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that 1996 is “the past”. It was, in fact, only about three weeks ago.
Quite right. In fact anything which happened after the Sex Pistols is but a footnote in musical history
Pretty much all music is a footnote to Kites by Simon Dupree.
I realised early on in my TV viewing career that any hope of historical accuracy was doomed. I was in the cubs in the late 60’s and early 70s and part way through my career we were presented with a new purple coloured Scouting badge and that replaced the previously issued red one. Imagine my amusement as a kid seeing Pte Pike wearing the new issue one on his homeguard uniform some time later.
I’m trying to remember what sort of words and phrases were fashionable in the mid 90s now. The only one I can think of is “Large” which seems utterly ridiculous now.
Yeah, it’s much easier to spot what shouldn’t be there than what *should*. And of course cobbling dialogue together from the buzzwords of the day would have been crap in a different way.
Having racked my brains, the words and phrases I can come up with that would have been more or less current in the mid-90s are: more Britpop/Loaded-isms (Sorted, ‘avin’ it, …) and related items (ladette, alcopop), the use of ‘sad’ to describe trainspotter-y, collector-y behaviour, the thin end of the admin-speak wedge, e.g. ‘issue’ for ‘problem’, jocular use of faux-PC language (vertically-challenged etc), the formula ‘How cool (or other adjective) is that?’, political buzzwords like double whammy, New Labour New Danger, the expression too much information (which I first heard in Pulp Fiction), possibly the word ‘buzzword’ itself, maybe people starting to talk openly about stress, being stressed out and so on, characters in UK soaps saying Oprah-y things like ‘You were never there for me’ and finally a personal bugbear in the 90s, the use of ‘devastated’ by ‘civilians’, i.e. people outside the media, as a catch-all for any setback from their football team losing to their family being wiped out. And then there’s catchphrases – ‘Papa’ ‘Nicole’, …NOT!, Eat my shorts etc…
It also occurred to me that maybe this is another area (like, say, pop music) where historical context is becoming unimportant.
See also – lad/ladette, all sorts of football speak entering the mass language, ‘laters’ (for goodbye), and (from film) ‘no way!’ ‘Way!’ and ‘… Not!!!’
Have an Up for that list Noburu. An excellent overview.
More than the language, what struck me as being completely anachronistic was the casual use of mobile phones. In 1996? Surely they weren’t that mass market – I then checked & the uk penetration in 1995 was only 7%
I’m sure the writer would employ the get-out that these characters happened to be among the 7%, possibly with the justification that they were involved in a covert police operation as opposed to being ‘ordinary people’. But, yeah, casual use definitely not. The cliche used to be that any ‘pleb’ with a mobile phone was a drug dealer.
I was working in a bookshop when I first saw someone use a mobile phone, in the early 90s I guess. We took it in turns to peer round a corner at him.
The new Mojo includes a vintage ad from 1985 for a brick sized mobile which can store up to 40 numbers, and is hugely discounted to just $1499.
“penetration” – gnnnrk
I heard someone say “back to mine” in a 70s drama. I’m convinced that all that “back to mine/yours” malarkey wasn’t in common usage until much later, at least the 90s/00s.
Similarly, someone said they were a bit short of money. “at the minute”. Surely this variation on “at the moment” or “just now” wasn’t used until decades later?
I think ‘back to mine’ is a Scottish thing. I have a Glaswegian friend who has always said it.
The one that comes up regularly in period TV dramas is “train station”. Up to the late 1980s most* people would have said railway station.
* I know there are regional exceptions, train station was fairly common north east usage as early as the 1970s.
In London we would say train station in the 80s, to differentiate from tube station – tube or train, rather than railway or underground.
While in Suffolk we said station. (Or tube station if we wanted the underground on a visit to That London.)
If we wanted a bus, it was from the bus station.
Good point, station on its own generally referred to railways and you qualified it for bus, ambulance, fire, etc.
Slightly off post…..it’s a few years since I watched it but I think Life on Mars got the dialogue right most of the time. This may have been because of the premise of the show and the confusion caused by someone from 30 years in the future landing in the mid 70s who almost spoke another language to the one used by Gene Hunt and Co.
Ripper Street. Why do they all talk like they are in a sketch satirising Shakespearean dialogue ? Why?
Because it’s a deliberately stylised and heightened dialogue which, in context, contributes greatly to the deliberately stylised and heightened look and feel of the drama. Personally, I think it’s absolutely brilliant.
Nah, all dialogue is stylised (not sure what heightened dialogue is, but it sounds good) to one degree or another: this, for me, is just wrong, and diminishes the immersion factor of the drama. I still like it a lot, mind.
Shakespearean? Faux-Victorian or even Quasi-Dickensian I’ll buy.
Indubitably, my fine fellow.
I could never get on with Nicholas Parsons’ insistence, right up to the end of the seventies, on describing the top prize on Sale Of The Century as a “motor car”, as though it required a chap to walk in front of it with flag.
But then I’ve never heard anyone use the phrase “railway station” in real life. The closest I got was a joke about where you weigh a whale..
My bugbear is when they have a programme based in, say, the 1970s and all the furniture in the house is classic 1970s style. The reality is that apart from wallpaper and the odd lamp the average house in the 70s would have looked like a timewarp from the 60s or even 50s.
Re language I think by the mid 90s a lot of the phrases people used were from popular programmes like ‘men behaving badly’ and even Harry Enfield’s early 90s shows. So lots of ‘mate’ at the end of every sentence, and ‘Oi, Noooo’s. And of course all the Simpsonisms: ‘doh!’.
Interesting ones that caught the zeitgeist were ‘It Girl’ applied to tara palmer tomkinson etc but actually from the album of the same name by Sleeper. And of course the influence of lad mags ‘Loaded’ and lad culture ‘Oasis’ so lots of cockneyisms like ‘havin a laugh’ for taking the piss, and ‘blaggin’ for getting something free, a ‘mare’ for nightmare ie something very bad.
It’s funny how little phrases suddenly appear, are said by every idiot for a while then die out. Mid 90s example ‘it’s like [fill in blank] on acid!’ for something/one extreme or later 90s ‘Houston, we have a problem’ for observing that something is fucked up.
I read a biography of Paula Yates from the mid 90s and all the language in that takes you back to that time.
Scuse me fogeying here, but what the vegging heck are “carrot jeans”?
…..incoming: a feeble joke about turnips/turnups
Wide at the top, tapering down to a narrow ankle. Like upside-down flares. Unflattering and horrible.
Ah, I see, you mean jodhpurs.