Did They Really Say That in 1882?

February 12, 2022
Posted by Jay Livingston

Language anachronisms in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “Mad Men” often came through loud and clear, at least to my ears. The shows were set in 1960, a time when I was alive — speaking and listening. (See earlier posts here and here ) “The Gilded Age” on HBO is set in 1882, before my time. Still, some of the language in this week’s episode, “Face the Music,” sounded more recent. Julian Fellowes, who created the show and did much of the writing, came in for some criticism (here, for example) for the language anachronisms in his “Downton Abbey.” I can just see him chuckling now as he waves the title “Face the Music” to lure in the language police and then swats them back by having Mr. Russell say, “To employ a modern phrase, I'm afraid you must face the music.’”

OK, “face the music” was not a phrase before its time. But in 1882 it wasn’t exactly modern either. My own memory does not extend back to 1882. That’s why we (and that includes Mr. Fellowes) have the Oxford English Dictionary, and according to the OED, this “modern phrase” has one example from a newspaper fifty years before the Gilded Age and another from 1850: “There should be no skulking or dodging...every man should ‘face the music’.”

If you’re not watching the show, know that Mr. Russell is the nouveau-riche businessman. His adversaries who must face the music are the establishment wealthy. They have connived to ruin him financially, but Russell outwits them, using his own wealth to put them on the verge of financial ruin. He will have his revenge. “I didn't see this coming. I admit it. I thought you were honorable men. Not too honorable to miss the chance of a fat buck, of course, but not greedy, dirty thieves.”

He adds, “I thought I was the one who might throw a curveball.”

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Curveball? By 1882, pitchers had been throwing curveballs for a decade. But they were literal curveballs. Metaphorical curveballs didn’t come into play for another half-century.

In an earlier scene, Russell’s daughter uses the phrase “the thing is.”

This too sounded modern to my ears, even if she did not use the double “is” that many people today  add, as in “The thing is is that it’s very recent.”  I may have been wrong. The OED finds Matthew Arnold using it 1873. “The question [of a state church]..is..so absolutely unimportant! The thing is, to recast religion.” I’m not sure that this is exactly the way we use it. The first clear example of that in the OED is from John Galsworthy in 1915. “Look here, old man, the thing is, of course, to see it in proportion.”

Finally, there was “identify.” Miss Scott has submitted her short stories to a newspaper. They are, the editor tells her, “beautifully constructed and executed.” The problem is that Miss Scott is Black and so is the main character in the story under consideration. The editor tells her that some adjustments will be necessary.

“The little colored girl would need to be changed to a poor white child.”

Why, she asks.  

“Our readers will not identify with a colored girl's story of redemption.”

I was mostly wrong about this one. Identify in this sense goes back at least to the early 1700s. But until the mid-20th century there was always a pronoun like himself or onesself  between identify and with. What the editor should have said is “Our readers will not identify themselves with a colored girl’s story.” In 1882, the reflexive pronoun was still required. Today, it has been absorbed into the word identify.

Trends in the Word Market

February 10, 2022
Posted by Jay Livingston

Kieran Healy tweeted recently about his 2017 paper “Fuck Nuance.”

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I wondered again, as I wondered when I heard Kieran present this paper at the ASA meetings,* is nuance itself a recent thing, or is it just that the word has become fashionable? The Nexis-Uni database of news finds only seven instances of the word before 1975, the first coming in 1969. Before then, there was no nuance to fuck.

The word seems to have been put into play by theater critics. But surely there must have been performances in earlier decades that critics of the 70s and beyond would have called “nuanced.” Praise for scholarly writings as nuanced happens a decade or so later. But how might an earlier take on those same performances or writings have phrased it?

I don’t know.

Then there’s “sustainable.” How I wish I had bought stock in Sustainable in 1980. It would have been like buying Bitcoin in 2010. But in this case, I have a good idea of the word sustainable replaced: viable.

I associate the word with the Kennedy administration. It seemed that government higher-ups were always talking about “viable options.” Today we would call them “sustainable options.” For example, today’s Inside Higher Ed (here) quotes someone saying of a colleague, “the demands of both his role here and his elected position are not sustainable.” He means that the colleague can’t fulfill the demands of both roles. Or to put it in the language of 1965, continuing in both roles is not a viable option.

Perhaps “nuance” no longer be viable. It will see the fading of its cachet, and I will look back and wonder why I didn’t sell my Nuance shares as soon as I heard Kieran present that paper.

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* The title was the first slide in Kieran’s presentation, and it remained on the screen as Kieran took care of technical matters at the podium. Then he clicked to the second slide, which, if memory serves, was “No, seriously. Fuck it.”

Consider the Social Class of the Lobster

January 26, 2022
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Food isn’t about nutrition,” wrote Robin Hanson some years ago (here). But it’s also not about taste, or at least not all about taste. Which foods we prize and which we despise also depends on what the food says about the people who consume it, especially their social status.

In the first episode of “The Gilded Age,” the Russells decide to throw an elegant dinner party. They are newly rich, very rich, and new to the neighborhood, Fifth Avenue at 61st St., where they have built a mansion. Mrs. Russell thinks that the dinner, along with generous donations to old-money charities, will bring the Russells entree into “society.”

She is wrong. Old money snubs her. The Russells prepare for 200 guests. Nobody comes.

Like an officer reviewing the troops, she walks past the tables laden with elegant foods.

“What will you do with it all?” asks her husband.
“Church. Get the kitchen staff to box it up and send a message in the morning to the Charity Organization Society. Ask them to collect it.”
“I don’t know what the poor of New York will make of lobster salad.”

He’s wrong. The poor would remember the times not so long ago when lobster was a food for common people, not a delicacy for the elite.

Lobster, as David Foster Wallace mentions in passing in his famous essay, was not always a delicacy. In the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, lobster was trash food. It was fed to prisoners. Two hundred fifty years later, the social status of lobster hadn’t improved. In the 1870s, indentured servants sued, successfully, so that their masters could feed them lobster no more than three times a week. [From a blogpost of two years ago, here.]

“The Gilded Age” begins in 1882, which is possibly the inflection point in the lobster trajectory from prole trash to pricey treat. The sites I’ve looked at say imprecisely that the change started “in the 1880s,” so it could have been any time in that decade. I would have loved it if the show had used this history to a culinary dimension to the conflict. The Russells, with their antennae tuned to the latest in fashions, have their groaning board include the new hot item — lobster. Meanwhile in the mansion across the street, old-money Agnes Van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) learns of this and comments to Ada (Cynthia Nixon), “And did you hear? Lobster. Indeed. Does she really expect that anyone in society would tolerate being served lobster?”

Being the Ricardos — Who’s Gaslighting Who?

January 17, 2022
Posted by Jay Livingston

The most frequently viewed post on this blog by far is the original one about language anachronisms on “The  Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (here). Google “Maisel anachronism,” and this blog will be near the top of the list.  “Mad Men” too sometimes dotted the1950s landscape with twentieth-century language. (Blog posts are here and here).

This month, television once again took us back to the 1950s with “Being the Ricardos,” and once again the script has language that sounds much too new. We’re not talking about TV fluff where historical precision hardly matters — sitcoms like “The Godldbergs,” set in the 1980s but with a writers’ room stocked with writers who in that decade were barely toddling. But “Being the Ricardos,” written and directed by Aaorn Sorkin, asks to be taken seriously, and Sorkin has a great ear for dialogue.

Yet he gives us this moment in the writers’ room when Madelyn, one of the writers, has suggested a story line that involves Ricky cheating on his taxes. Desi, who is honest about his own taxes, says that his TV character too would never cheat on his taxes. Another writer, Bob, thinks the cheating plot element would work. “It’s very relatable. Everyone does.”

In 1955, things were not “relatable.”  

A few seconds later, Sorkin’s script has this:

Her process? People did not have processes in the 1950s. They just did things the way they did them. They weren’t relatable either. Here are the graphs from Google nGrams, which tallies the frequency of words in books. Both these terms come into wide use only well after the 1950s. True, it takes time for a trendy word to go from everyday talk to a published book, but the lag time is not forty years.

Then there’s gaslighting. Gas as a way of lighting streets and rooms came in around 1800, and that was the gaslight referred to in the 1944 movie, which was set in the late 19th century. Gaslight was a noun. The current usage — as a verb meaning to try to make someone doubt their own true perceptions — didn’t appear until the 21st century.

In “Being the Ricardos,” although Desi does not cheat on his taxes, he may be doing another kind of cheating. Lucy suspects, Desi denies and suggests that she is unreasonably suspicious, that the problem is in her mind.

In the 1950s, people talked about lying and cheating, Men might suggest say their wives were imagining things, might even suggest that they see a psychiatrist, and wives might see all that as a baseless ploy. But nobody called it gaslighting.

Is Sorkin trying to get us to think that 65 years ago people talked about their process and whether something was relatable? Is Sorkin gaslighting us?