How They Spoke

[poliphilo]

 Judy is reading a time travel story which has modern day people going back to 1914- and it's annoying her that the dialogue the author gives his Georgians to speak feels really "off".

Yeah, well, but how did people speak in 1914? What's our evidence?

It's almost entirely literary. And literary dialogue has been cleaned up, tidied up, rendered, well, literary. And, anyway, we can't know whether any particular writer had a good ear for dialogue or not. 

Did anyone ever speak like Oscar Wilde's people- except, perhaps, Oscar himself? Was the speech of Irish peasants half as as colourful as the stuff Synge puts in their mouths? Going back a bit further, did Dickens's Cockneys really transpose their "v"s and "w"s and if so when did they stop?

And how did people cuss during the Great War? Someone a while back was protesting that is was wildly anachronistic to have soldiers saying "fuck" in the movie 1917- and it piqued my interest, so I dug. Turns out they certainly did- all the fucking time- only you wouldn't know it from most of the contemporary novels, memoirs and plays.

Accuracy bows before good manners. It does in our time too. Stick a microphone in front of someone's face and they'll start minding their "p"s and "q"s. There's a lot more casual casual racism (the taboo of our times) in the speech of the streets than shows up in the record that will be available to our grand kids....

Comments

[cmcmck]

Yes, Cockneys did transpose their V's and W's although I'm not sure when it stopped.

[poliphilo]

The stopping is what's really odd. What brought about the transition from Sam Weller to Michael Caine

[sovay]

And how did people cuss during the Great War?

If you have not already read Frederic Manning's Her Privates We (1929) in your researches, I recommend it in the strongest terms, which are pretty strong when not bowdlerized for publication.

[poliphilo]

I haven't read Manning, but I should.... I'm aware that he is one of the key witnesses to the cussin'

[paserbyp]

Agreed, specially about Irish peasants language compare with anything else…

[haertstitch]

during, in war
the less spoken was better
a stray word would kill you.

the people fighting ice
haven't figured it out
and its killing them.
they need to make use of silence.

remembering Hemingway
for words

[poliphilo]

Yes, making fun of a thug with a gun is unwise....

[haertstitch]

he was primed
should not have been doing the job
still reacting to the last incident

the wife tried to show concern
but did a crappy ass job of it

the whole mess just was set up

bet the guy disappears

[poliphilo]

The present administration will protect him but there's no guarantee the next one will.

[mtbc]

I'd like to think we can get at least half an idea from the wartime letters exchanged by non-literary people. I wonder to what extent the letters of the less formally educated tend to mirror their speech patterns.

[poliphilo]

My suspicion is that such letters would for the most part be awkward and stilted- and further removed from ordinary speech than those of people who are at ease with language.