Tony Kushner, who wrote Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (2012), tried to make the English as 1865 as possible – while still making sense in 2012 and not sounding “like a historical waxwork”.
He read all things Lincoln to be able to express himself like Lincoln. He read plays, novels, letters and speeches to know the English of the time. He also has a 20 volume print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary that he bought when he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. If a word did not sound right he checked its history in the Oxford. Oh, and he had two historians read the script.
But we have one thing he did not have: the Google Books Ngram Viewer! Put in a word or phrase and you can see how common it was in print over the course of the past 300 years.
Words and phrases in Spielberg’s “Lincoln” that were rare in 1865:
- 13th Amendment – That is how we think of it. They would have just said “constitutional amendment” or “slavery amendment” since it was the first amendment in 60 years.
- absolutely guaranteed – a phrase we get from newspaper ads of the late 1800s
- equal pay – 1880s
- snuck – sounds solidly Anglo-Saxon but comes from 1887. They would have said “sneaked”.
- bipartisanship – from the 1890s
- imagine the possibilities – rare before the 1890s
- barrage – 1900
- highly unusual – rare till 1900
- switched – only railways did that back then.
- other possibility is
- sniper – from the Boer War. They would say “sharpshooter”.
- racial equality – they would say “negro equality”. Racial equality would mean not just blacks and whites but Chinese and American Indians too.
- win the war – from the First World War
- overseas – from the First World War as a nice way to say “colonial”.
- signing up – from the First World War
- speed things up
- Jeez – 1922
- bottleneck – metaphorical use from 1922
- hometown – rare before the 1930s. No one talked much about hometowns till it became common to leave them.
- dirt farmer – 1930s
- democratic process – 1930s
- patronage jobs – 1930s
- lame-duck Congress – 1940s
- intended target
- coloreds – rare till the 1940s
- prejudiced – was not assumed to be about race till the 1950s
- Kevin – an extremely rare name in America in the 1800s. There was only one Kevin in the whole Union army.
- peace talks – rare before the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
- fuck – not a word anyone would have said to Lincoln
- Nice to meet you
- prosecutorial – not common till Watergate in the 1970s.
- humans – slang back then, probably would not have been used in Congress. Did not catch on till the 1970s as gender neutral for “man”.
- someone who – gender neutral for “he who”
- held hostage – 1970s
- I like our chances – 1980s
In short, feminism, urbanization and the First World War shape the English found in “Lincoln”.
Kushner did put in some words and phrases that were more common back then:
- flub-dubs
- Old Neptune, shake thy hoary locks
- peace commissioners
- Phil-del – a Lincolnism for Philadelphia.
- perhaps – in place of “maybe”
- shindy
- grousle – made up by Kushner as something Lincoln might have said
Lincoln did use the N-word but not Kushner’s Lincoln.
– Abagond, 2013.
Sources:
- Benjamin Schmidt: The Atlantic, Prochronism – he also does “Downton Abbey” and “Mad Men”
- Ben Zimmer: Boston Globe,
- vocabulary.com
- ‘Lincoln’ Cussing
- languagehat.com
- Google Books Ngram Viewer – hours of fun! Especially while studying for final exams.
- Etymology Online
See also:
I wonder about how the ability to broadcast and record sound for the past 100 plus years has changed that. Or maybe it hasn’t changed it much at all. Do we watch period dramatizations of the 1920s using language from the 1990s? Gone with the Wind was produced in 1939, about midway between now and the Civil War. I don’t remember them using the terms “colored” or “blacks”, but they did use terms like “darkie”.
I think it is great if dramatists could use the language of the period, as long as the audience can still understand. Maybe there could be a glossary to explain language no longer commonly used. I think this adds as much to the re-enactment of the period as do costumes, or technology / props.
In 2060, when they do dramatizations of the Japanese American internment, will they use the term “Asian”, something that did not become popular until the 1970s? or will they talk use the term “African American” when re-enacting anything that occurred during the civil rights movement?
But maybe a period piece about the election of Barack Obama would have people listening to Sony Walkman and call people “cool dude”. Sometimes they know, like when a car appears in the distance of films portraying late 19th century.
I won’t be here to watch the dramas in the 2060s. What will they need to do to be politically correct about the times?
Let’s compare “Birth of a Nation” to “Gone with the Wind” to “How the West was Won” to “Roots” and “the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” to what comes out nowadays. Sometimes the anachronisms themselves tell you something about the times.
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Not sure about that.
It appears that the Bureau of Colored Troops was formed in 1863,which formed the United States Colored Troops in the Union Army. The term must have been popular enough in the 1860s for it to name Government departments. And the NAACP formed in 1909, so I am not sure how colored could be a rare term until the 1940s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Colored_Troops
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@ Jefe
“Colored” and “human” were both common as adjectives but not as nouns: coloreds, humans.
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@ Peanut
From what I understand the f-word was rare back then. When people wanted to curse they would use religion, words like God, Jesus, damn, hell, bloody and combinations and modifications thereof. Even the words “curse” and “cuss” come from that idea.
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I found the dialogue and some of the scenes in Lincoln were very unrealistic for that time. The scenes of Lincoln fighting with his wife…I’m sorry but that just wouldn’t have happened back then. A wife just did what the husband said and that was that.
The scene of his son arguing with Lincoln was almost laughable. A son would have never talked back to his father back then – never. Joseph Gordon Levitts acting was also horrible.
And Lincoln talked like a 1960s hippie or beatnik. Some of his lines were ridiculously out of date.
In general I thought this movie was pretty awful. Spielberg should stick to kids movies.
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Your long list of anachronistic words in Lincoln is telling — clearly you did not get all that from Ngram Viewer (but it appears a useful tool). As for anachronism, I made it to the end of Corporal Ira Clarke’s little speech to Lincoln before being overwhelmed. There were articulate black men then standing up for their rights other than Frederick Douglas, but by the end of the exchange with Lincoln, I had a strong sense that the movie was just one more vehicle for recasting history according to prevailing sensibilities. Hollywood does not do history.
I thought I would force myself to watch more — enter the two white soldiers to recite the Gettysburg Address! I can stand no more.
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@Abagond
I was born in Washington, DC, towards the tail end of the Jim Crow. They did not have the colored / white signs there, but they did use the term (I heard my father use it often), and they did have that in my mother’s home state of Alabama where I spent time every year growing up, talking to my relatives and their neighbors who grew up with Jim Crow. To put a long story short, I heard the word every day growing up, even though “black” had begun to supplant it. (and it supplanted “colored people” rather than “coloreds”).
I don’t think “colored” was ever common as a noun. I may have heard “coloreds” every now and then, but 96-98% of the time, I heard it used as an adjective (eg, a colored woman is at the door, upstairs is for colored people, etc.)
In English, it is common, nevertheless, to nominalize adjectives and use them as nouns sometimes. It is possible that it was used as a noun more often in 1950 than 1863, but it probably still appeared sometimes in 1863 and in either case, it would not have been common.
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