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Confound it all! — 16 Comments

  1. Maria, don’t take those dates as written in stone. The dates for a word or phrase are the dates the word/phrase first appeared in print. Written language lags the spoken word. As a conservative estimate, I’d say you could have your characters use a word about 20 years before its date. Purists may scoff, but you can’t please everyone!

  2. Captain Grose’s Dictionary of Buckish Slang is a superb source of information on what was said when from the latter half of the 18th century till 1812.

    Eric Partridge also has written several books on historical slang and he’s tops.

    I rely on those two as well as always checking everything in the Oxford English Dictionary. And that and Grose are now available on the internet, as I understand it.

    I often have a reverse problem–much of colloquial English dates back to the 16th century and is still in regular use, but I’ve had several readers insist that my use of these words is modern and therefore grating, or indeed invented by Richard Curtis for Four Weddings and a Funeral, for example. Ha ha.

  3. Love this! I think my favourite run has to be: pah, pish, pooh, pshaw!!! 🙂

    I have been using the Online Etymology Dictionary but I’m keen to check out Captain Grose’s Dictionary of Buckish Slang! Thanks for sharing.

  4. I’ve found words were used in journals/letters long before they were recorded as used. Egad is one. Sources say 1675 but I’ve seen it prior to 1660. Words must be popular, widely spoken, before it’s considered by the list makers.

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  6. I remember when I saw “The Titanic,” it bugged me a bit when the heroine (played by Kate Winslet) “flipped the bird” at the policeman. It didn’t seem historically correct for 1912, so I tried to research when “the bird” became a gesture but couldn’t find anything at the time. Ha!

    Thank you for the fun information!

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