Posted by Jay Livingston
If you’re old enough, it’s easy to spot language anachronisms in period TV dramas like “Mad Men” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” I’m old enough. I notice the terms that we now take for granted but were nowhere to be heard in the wordscape of a few decades ago. (Earlier posts on these shows are here and here.) It’s much harder to remember the opposite — words and phrases from the period that have since disappeared, words that place the scene firmly in its historical context.
I’ve been watching “The Deuce” on HBO. It’s set in the world of West 42nd Street circa 1970, with its pimps and hookers, strippers and porn merchants, cops and gangsters, and assorted others who plied their trade in that neighborhood. Nothing in season one seemed out of place, maybe because the episodes were written or overseen by people old enough to have been bar-mitzvahed by 1970.
In Season Two, Candy (Maggie Gyllenhall), has gotten into porn as a way to escape the dangers of life as a street hooker. She has gone from being on camera to writing scripts. In Episode 4, we see her at a shoot where an actor complains about his lines, and others support him. The script is bad even by porn standards, they say. Candy agrees.
“I’m gonna try to tweak it,” she says.
No, no, no. In 1977, people didn’t tweak scripts. They didn’t tweak much of anything, but if they did, it was an actual thing you could pinch with your fingers. In porn, it might have been a nipple. Anywhere else, it was most likely a nose. Nothing had changed in the 370 years since Hamlet.* It was only towards the end of the 20th century that people began tweaking less tangible things like systems, colors, or designs.
(Click on the image for a larger view.
The graphs show the last few years of each period and the
most frequent completions of the phrase "tweak the” for the entire period.)
Candy has ambitions beyond grinding out low-budget, poorly written fuck films. She wants to produce a film with multi-layered story, with characters, and with a woman’s point of view. She has come up with the idea — a porno version of Little Red Riding Hood — but she realizes that she doesn’t have the talent to write the script. So she meets with a writer. When she reveals what the film will be, she fears that he’ll reject the project. But she’s wrong. “It’s genius,” the writer says.
I know what people did not say in 1977. But what did they say? What is the language equivalent of the disco suit, cool then but now forgotten? The only thing I can think of is groovy. Yes, there was a brief period — a few weeks back in the late 1960s — when people actually spoke the word without a trace of irony. But what else?
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* Who calls me “villain”? Breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? (II, ii)
4 comments:
One concept that was widely used back then was the idea of the computer as an electronic brain. That went out of use and has now (after a long hiatus) been replaced by "AI" (a term that I, as someone with an all-but-thesis in the field, think is completely devoid of any content and meaning and is nothing but hype, sigh. But I digress...).
There must be some amount of slang that's no longer used: "smack" for heroin for example. Valley girl talk was after that period. The lyrics of the folky/hippy rock stuff of the period (Richard and Mimi Farina, Dave van Ronk and the like are still on my playlist) seems to have survived the sands of time fairly well. Jazz lyrics are sometimes beyond my born-post-war linguistic sensibilities "The Lady is a Tramp"'s tramp has me scratching my head, and sometimes someone will ask what something means and I'll not know, but that's 1930s English, not 1970s.
In the world of "The Deuce," there's not too much talk about computers, strangely enough. In the lastest episode had more language anachronisms. Candy says she's going to play a part in her film and be "hot as fuck" (or maybe some other adjective. I'm not sure. But I sure that she said "as fuck," which is very, very recent. At another moment, having solved some problem that was holding up her word on the movie she's making, she says, "We've got this."
Also, I think we're still in 1970, but two characters go to a production of David Mamet's "Sexual Perversity in Chicago," which didn't open in New York till 1975, (which is when I saw it).
I looked up the writers on IMDB. One was born in 1971, the other seems to be much younger.
Season 2 is set in 1977
Oops. My mistake. I've corrected it in the post, but it makes little difference for the language anachronisms. There wasn't a whole lot of tweaking going on until the 21st century. But those two characters who mention "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" could indeed have seen it, as I did, two years earlier in 1975.
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